CONCEPT
Commitment Device
An external structure — a time limit, a protected period, an institutional norm — that an agent adopts to bind her future self to choices her present self, operating under a high discount rate, would not make. The Becker remedy for productive addiction.
A commitment device is a structure an agent adopts to constrain her own future behavior. The smoker who throws away the pack. The writer who disables her internet connection. The team that schedules mandatory offline hours. The organization that builds structured pauses into its workflow. The device works by raising the cost of defection — making it harder or more expensive for the future self to undo the choice the present self has made. In Becker-Murphy's rational addiction framework, commitment devices address the core problem that drives addiction: the agent's discount rate is pushed higher by the consumption itself, making the future self progressively less capable of resisting continuation. A commitment device counters this by installing constraints the future self cannot easily override.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Berkeley researchers' proposal for AI Practice — structured pauses, sequenced workflows, protected offline time — is, in Becker's terms, a