Can’t say that this is a new concept for me, but I am pleased that this idea is getting some serious exposure. Personally, I love the idea of a “droud” (neural simulator of SF writer Larry Niven origin), although I would have to think that “wireheading” would conceivably be the most controversial issue of the next 50 years.

I want one, although I’ll have to find the “surgeon” from Minority Report who performed Tom Cruise’s eyeball transplant. I can’t recall the character’s name, or if he had one, but the part was played by one of my favorite actors, Peter Stormrare. Sorry for the digression.

As far as the “Orgasmatron” device is concerned, there is only one person who has the eloquence, clarity of thought, and god-like transcendent wisdom necessary to approve/disapprove of its legion applications: DanThinksDances&femaleGspot.

DanThinks, where are you now?

Alan Bellows once again transcends all expectation with his remarkably fascinating articles.

Thank you everyone for your insightful commentary.

Interestingly enough, the phrase was originally “life, liberty, and property”, which makes a lot more sense.

DI article and I working on re-read my comments before I post them.

By “by the looks of things” I mean “by the look of things said in the article”

The last idea may be a little crude, but it gets the point across.
Even as I was writing these ideas down the idea of it completely creeped me out. After “enjoying” someone exploiting that technology you would revert back to yourself and immediately not enjoy what has just happened by the looks of things.

Alternatively you could be living a life that you seem completely content with but has actually been completely programmed into you (I think slaves would be far less likely to disobey where they “enjoying” what they are doing or conversely if they felt worse not doing what they were told. Terrorist attacks could be undertaken by individuals that are “enjoying” blowing themselves up even though they have no affiliation with the terrorist organization they are doing it for or are even aware of what they are doing for a terrorist organization).

I can see why there would be some reluctance to make this technology widely available to the general public given the implications of control it has over other people.

At least with pills you still control over whether you take them or not. I would defiantly opt out of an implanted device where this technology presented to me.

I don’t think I’m misremembering it but it’s possible that I’m mistakena and she was actually talking about it after the event, and that what she was describing was the experience on the table described above, the “goody place” bit.

I’ve been looking for this footage for years. I know I’m getting closer, but it still escapes me.

Many thanks
Mick

This reminds me of Will smith in the Movie the Pursuit of happiness, where he says how did Thomas Jefferson remember to add “Pursuit” in there.

I would like to think that having the ability to reason above that of the average rat (at least, most of us, I hope), we would be able to lay off the button long enough to sustain our lives. Even the most impaired drug addict will take at least minimal steps to preserve his own life. But I do see your point about the decline of productivity. Almost everything we do is for self gratification, either immediate or delayed. Who would be able to resist the most intense gratification to be had for simply the push of a button? But I do wonder what would happen over the long term. I can see it developing to the point where, due to constant exposure, the stimulus becomes attenuated. After awhile, you may prefer banging your thumb with a hammer just for the novelty of it.

And consider what comes after that…if the pleasure center of our brain becomes overloaded by direct stimulus, to which we have become inured, from what then will we take pleasure? None of the old pleasurable stimuli will work, since the “pleasure threshold” has been raised too high to be reached by any other means.

Note that the rats in the experiment preferred the stimulation of their pleasure centre over food (and other experimentation has shown that animals do in fact continue self-stimulating until death), so even the biological imperatives hunger overridden by these sensations (as soon as you feel something unpleasant – such as the sensation of your body dying of thirst, you could just drown it out with another flood of pleasure – which is much simpler that getting up and going to fetch some water (which would mean interrupting the chain of euphoria). My guess is you’d keep zapping away until you died of thirst/hunger/exhaustion – probably with a smile on your face… (I guess you could regard it as the most enjoyable way to commit suicide…)

Now, I imagine that the technology could be used medically for the treatment of emotional disorders (as suggested above) – provided that it was properly regulated to prevent tot addiction scenario from occurring (i.e. regulate the amount of stimulation so that it just counteracts the negative influence of the condition being treated without crossing the threshold of becoming actually pleasurable – simply leveling the field as it were). However, I cannot see it happening – and not for any ethical reasons, or because the powers that be are squeamish about authorizing the procedure; but rather for reasons of simple corporate greed. The big pharmaceutical companies are making massive amounts of money off of the public through the medications that are prescribed (often for a long term, even a lifetime), and they are not about to sit back and let a one-shot-fix solution come to the fore and take away all that revenue. Now if one of those companies were to buy out and license the technology – that might be another story… Then they’d make the cost of the procedure so high that only the uber-rich could afford it anyway… (like they do with many medications – medical science can treat a lot of conditions, but only the rich can afford it a lot of the time).