Three-Dot Anxiety

There was a fair bit of discussion on whether LLMs count as a Skinner box delivering intermittent variable rewards that induce compulsive behavior. Most people seemed to think it wasn't quite as bad as a slot machine (I mean really, what could be worse than a slot machine?)

Today I realized skinner boxes are in plenty of innocuous, non-gambling places though. If you are chatting someone on Teams or wherever, and the three dots appear, you will hover over the chat box for a far longer time waiting for a response, than you would otherwise if that feature wasn't there. Without the three dots, you would probably just move on to your next task, and return once you got the reply notification. The three dots are worse than chat notifications in that sense.