AI, Our Free "Dopamine Engine": From "Freedom From" to "Freedom To"
(This article is automatically generated based on my one-hour voice chat with Gemini 2.5 Pro)
The human pursuit of freedom is a profound dialogue with the biological instincts deep within us. Before we embark on this dialogue, we must first understand the two core aspects of “freedom,” as articulated by philosopher Isaiah Berlin:
- The first is “freedom from”, which is negative freedom. It aims to rid us of external constraints, coercion, and interference. This is about delineating a sacred, inviolable “space” in our lives, with its ultimate form being financial freedom—where you are free from the compulsion to sell your labor for a living.
- The second is “freedom to”, which is positive freedom. It seeks to make us masters of our own will, possessing enough ability and resources to realize our self-worth. This endows us with the “power” to act, with its ultimate form being creative freedom—where you can turn imagination into reality.
Understanding this pair of concepts allows us to uncover a deeper secret, revealed by Richard Sutton, the 2025 Turing Award winner and father of reinforcement learning, in his classic textbook “Reinforcement Learning”: what drives our happiness is not the static “reward” itself, but the dynamic “reward prediction error.” What truly makes our brains secrete dopamine and feel joy is the positive gap between “actual gain” and “prior expectation.”
A completely predictable, surprise-free world, no matter how affluent, has a reward prediction error approaching zero. This biologically explains why pure “Freedom From”—a comfortable, worry-free but unchanging haven—can ultimately lead to emptiness. In contrast, “Freedom To,” filled with challenges, exploration, and creation, is a powerful engine that continuously generates positive prediction errors.
Today, the rise of AI is handing the keys to this engine to each of us in unprecedented ways.
Act One: The “Invisible Cage” of the Old World and AI’s “Internal Breakout” (The Pursuit of ‘Freedom From’)
In the old paradigm, the road to freedom was primarily a grand “escape plan.” Its core goal was to achieve the maximum “Freedom From.” This escape route is filled with tangible obstacles that each of us may encounter, with shackles often present even before our careers begin.
1. Fundamental Shackles: Ability and Identity
Before discussing the specific constraints of the office, we must first examine two more fundamental limitations: one stemming from our own abilities and the other from externally imposed identities.
First, there is the freedom from the fear of unemployment that comes from personal ability. When you possess skills in high demand in the market and have built your professional reputation, you have the confidence of “if not here, then somewhere else.” This in itself is a powerful “Freedom From”—it frees you from anxiety about the uncertainty of the future and allows you to reject jobs you must take purely for a living. More importantly, this confidence directly unlocks a higher level of “Freedom To.” Because you are not worried about finding a job, you dare to take risks and boldly make suggestions in your current position; you dare to choose a path with slightly lower pay but more creativity; you even dare to quit without a plan to start your own business. This freedom based on ability is an important foundation for pursuing broader horizons.
Secondly, we face the cage of identity. This is a more helpless “lack of freedom,” often presetting numerous obstacles before you can showcase your talents, even denying you a fair chance to enter the arena.
- For example, the “random trial” of the H1B visa: You are a PhD graduate from a top university, holding several offers from Silicon Valley giants, ready to make your mark on the forefront of technology in the US. However, your future does not depend on your talent but on a random lottery. Because you didn’t get selected for the H1B, you are forced to give up everything you’ve accumulated here and return to a homeland that may feel unfamiliar, starting over.
- For example, the “nationality choice” of VC investment: You and your team have created an impressive AI product in China, attracting the attention of top US VCs. But to avoid geopolitical risks, your company must relocate overseas, and you and your co-founders need to move your families. For the future of the company, you are forced to become a “legal and tax nomad.”
These are enormous constraints imposed by the external environment before you can showcase your talents. They are the heaviest, most helpless shackles that “Freedom From” longs to break free from.
2. The “Specific Constraints” of the Office
For those fortunate enough to enter the arena, large companies, as a highly structured “reward acquisition system,” provide stability while also imposing various mind-wearing “specific constraints”:
Freedom from the “time tax” of ineffective meetings: Imagine this scenario: you are a senior backend engineer, deeply immersed in solving a complex performance bottleneck. But you must sit here, attending a two-hour “product vision alignment meeting.” You watch as the product manager presents a PRD you saw last week, listening to the designer and product manager debate whether a button should be 14px or 16px. What you long for is the freedom from being forced to attend meetings unrelated to your core output.
Freedom from the “innovation tax” of complex processes: Your colleague, a talented security researcher, discovers a critical vulnerability in an open-source library that requires only five lines of code to fix. But in a large company, he must first submit a technical proposal review, wait for the architect committee’s schedule; once approved, it must go through two levels of managerial approval; finally, it must be executed by a dedicated SRE team during a specific release window. A 5-minute task ultimately takes two weeks, during which the entire system remains exposed to risk. What you long for is the freedom from rigid bureaucratic processes, regaining the right to efficient execution.
Freedom from the “emotional tax” of office politics: During the annual performance review, the project you delivered had the highest technical difficulty and the best user feedback. But the highest rating goes to another team leader, whose technical skills are mediocre but who meticulously prepares PPTs every week, ensuring every VP knows about his “hard work.” Your code and achievements pale in comparison to the art of “managing up.” What you long for is the freedom from wasting energy on guessing people’s minds and self-promotion, letting code and achievements speak for themselves.
3. The “Internal Breakout” of the AI Era
However, the emergence of AI offers a new possibility: conducting an “invisible breakout” within large companies, reclaiming your “Freedom From” in advance.
This is not about opposing the system but about using AI to cleverly bypass the least efficient aspects:
- Specific breakout techniques: Imagine using AI tools to transcribe and summarize all the meetings you must attend but don’t need to speak at, only alerting you when your name is mentioned. You gain 5-10 hours of deep work time each week. Now imagine when your boss asks you to conduct a “feasibility study” on a new direction, instead of spending a week writing a 20-page document, you use AI to build an interactive, impressive DEMO over the weekend. In Monday’s meeting, while others are presenting static PPTs, you showcase a living product. A living prototype that creates “reward prediction error” is far more persuasive than a thousand words.
In this way, even if you are in a cog-like position, you possess the ability of a creator, able to influence decisions from the bottom up, maintaining a high-speed, small “dopamine engine” within the system, avoiding complete assimilation by the system.
Act Two: AI Engine Fully Open, A Personal “Creative Carnival” (The Explosion of ‘Freedom To’)
If AI is a “breakout” tool in Act One, then in Act Two, it is the engine for creating an entirely new world. It transforms “Freedom To”—the freedom to create, learn, experience, and take risks—from a luxury for the few into a necessity accessible to the masses.
The core of this revolution is that AI endows individuals with unprecedented “leverage,” greatly enriching the connotation of “Freedom To”:
Freedom to Create: You have a vague idea about “vibe design”—letting AI understand the requirements and turn them into design drafts. In the past, this required assembling a top-notch team of dozens, including compiler experts, NLP researchers, and UI designers, costing millions of dollars and years. Now, a small elite team like Lovart’s can quickly turn this idea into reality. They don’t care about the complex processes of large companies, only about how to serve the pure goal of “empowering designers with AI” as quickly as possible. This is the most direct manifestation of “freedom to create”—the resistance to turning ideas into reality has been unprecedentedly reduced.
Freedom to Learn: You develop a strong interest in bioinformatics, but it requires deep knowledge of genetics and statistics. In the past, you needed to return to school for a new degree. Now, you can have AI tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT as your personal tutor. You can have it explain complex principles of gene sequencing, write data analysis scripts for you, and help you read the latest academic papers. AI removes the knowledge barriers to entering new fields, granting you the freedom of boundless learning and cross-disciplinary exploration. This also reinforces your “freedom from the fear of unemployment.”
Freedom to Experience: This freedom goes beyond work itself, extending to how you live. You want to travel the world for a year while maintaining your independent development projects. AI tools can help you manage client communication (automated email replies), handle finances (smart bookkeeping), and even write some non-core marketing copy. AI becomes your “remote assistant,” freeing you from geographical constraints, truly realizing the “digital nomad” lifestyle. More broadly, it grants you freedom of time—liberating you from repetitive tasks, giving you more time to do the sports you love, develop a hobby, or spend time with family. This is the ultimate freedom to choose your lifestyle and work location.
Freedom to Risk: Look at Silicon Valley today. Why can companies like OpenAI and Anthropic attract the world’s top talent? Because they offer an extreme “freedom to risk.” They use the grand narrative of AGI and the enormous potential rewards (both economically and in terms of impact) to attract top minds who are not satisfied with optimizing an ad click rate in a large company. Here, the average contribution of each employee to the company’s valuation can reach 10 million or even 100 million dollars. This is not simply “work”; it is a gamble of personal intelligence with the fate of humanity. AI makes the stakes of this gamble unprecedentedly large, making the freedom to pursue nonlinear returns unprecedentedly enticing.
Final Chapter: Designing Your Modern Path to Freedom
So, do we have to accumulate “Freedom From” in a big company before pursuing “Freedom To”?
In the AI era, the answer is no. The traditional linear path is being broken, and the two paths are now parallel and deeply intertwined.
Path One: Internal Evolver. You can choose to stay in a big company, but your strategy is no longer “passive endurance.” You view it as a platform providing a stable safety net, while you use AI as your “invisible fighter jet” to carve out your own space within the organization—automating tedious work to reclaim time, building impressive prototypes to gain a voice. You are establishing a high-frequency operating “dopamine engine” within a large system that belongs to you.
Path Two: Direct Creator. You can also choose to dive directly into creation. With the powerful leverage of AI, you and a small, elite team, or even on your own, can build products and create companies. The beauty of this path is that once your “Freedom To” exploration succeeds, it directly brings you the ultimate “Freedom From.” A successful, self-sustaining AI application or company naturally grants you financial freedom, freeing you from the compulsion to work for others. Here, “Freedom From” is no longer the starting point but the spoils of victory after achieving “Freedom To.”
Ultimately, the most profound freedom of this era is a kind of Meta-Freedom: a deep understanding of the meaning and cost of both types of freedom, and the ability to dynamically and consciously choose and combine your paths according to your life stage, risk preference, and inner passion.
True freedom is no longer about reaching a comfortable harbor once and for all, but about becoming an excellent helmsman, personally designing and steering an AI-driven, never-ending “dopamine engine,” exploring joyfully and endlessly in an ocean full of uncertainty but also full of surprises.