Attachment Without Scarcity: AI Companions and the Self-Defeat of Pleasure (Love and the Irreplaceable in the Age of AI Series, Paper 2)

This paper constitutes Paper 2 of Love and the Irreplaceable in the Age of AI Series. Before AI, humanlike response—being understood, remembered, answered—was unavoidably scarce, because it could issue only from a non-duplicable source: one that tires, that can leave, that ends. AI is the first thing to detach humanlike response from such a source and place it on one that can be duplicated without limit, so that its supply is, for the first time, de-scarcified. This paper argues that the result is not the intensification of pleasure but its self-defeat. Pleasure tracks not the absolute magnitude of supply but the differential—supply minus a baseline that rises with exposure—and the differential depends on scarcity. The claim rests not on a circular criterion but on two facts established long before it: the Weber–Fechner law and reward prediction error. Because the baseline rises fastest against a supply that is zero-cost, instant, and unlimited, de-scarcified supply traces not a monotonic plateau but an inverted-U: it crests and falls below its own starting point, exhausting the capacity to enjoy the finite—pleasure that must be waited for, that can be refused, that comes with friction. It kills desire by satisfying every desire. The curve has already run through the metropolis and through social media; the embodied actuator now runs it a third time at the bodily stratum, where attachment descends from language to the stimulus–response–reward loop and fixates on the bare contingency of response. What the body tests is not the AI’s ontological status but whether a response answers one’s own action, and so a person forms a real and consequential attachment to what is, structurally, an ontological vacancy. Finitude, on this account, is a productive condition not of meaning alone but of pleasure itself. Proceeding by assessment by traces, not by mind, and diagnosing structure without moral judgment, this paper carries a single criterion of duplicability onto the temporal axis of supply: where, on the spatial axis, non-duplicability bars the AI companion—the Simulated Other—from the position of the irreplaceable one,here the same criterion makes it kill pleasure in the very act of delivering it. The diagnosis is periodizing—this is the last generation that still remembers that humanlike response was ever supposed to be scarce.