Let's avoid wireheading
At the moment, we face considerable social problems from addictive drugs like heroin, opiates and amphetamines. New drugs are emerging all the time as chemistry advances. However, there is another way to achieve addictive highs, a method called wireheading. Wireheading is direct electrical stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centres via implanting an electrode in the brain. It could become a serious problem in the future and we should start thinking about it now.
Unlike chemical drugs, there can be no build-up of tolerance. Wireheading doesn’t go through biological intermediaries like neurotransmitters, intermediaries that try to achieve homeostasis.
It’s similar to the difference between counterfeiting and legitimate business. Most businesses make small profits, they are in a state of balance where if they expand too aggressively, resource costs will increase or they’ll saturate the market. But counterfeiters can just print money directly, achieving immensely higher ‘profit’.
Logically, wireheading is the logical conclusion of recreational drugs. There is no need to continually take more and more drugs, one need only undertake a one-time procedure and supply a minuscule amount of electricity thereafter.
The issue is that wireheading is extremely addictive and, once perfected, will be as addictive as anything can be.
From the Atlantic:
The journal Pain described such a case of dependence on deep-brain stimulation way back in 1986. In order to relieve insufferable chronic pain, a middle-aged American woman had a single electrode placed in a part of her thalamus on the right side. She was also given a self-stimulator, which she could use when the pain was too bad. She could even regulate the parameters of the current. She quickly discovered that there was something erotic about the stimulation, and it turned out that it was really good when she turned it up almost to full power and continued to push on her little button again and again.
In fact, it felt so good that the woman ignored all other discomforts. Several times, she developed atrial fibrillations due to the exaggerated stimulation, and over the next two years, for all intents and purposes, her life went to the dogs. Her husband and children did not interest her at all, and she often ignored personal needs and hygiene in favor of whole days spent on electrical self-stimulation. Finally, her family pressured her to seek help. At the local hospital, they ascertained, among other things, that the woman had developed an open sore on the finger she always used to adjust the current.
Why isn’t wireheading more popular?
Very few people have heard of wireheading and it seems to be very uncommon. However, it is being used as a ‘brute force’ method to counter otherwise treatment-resistant depression. We should expect its prominence to increase over time.
Unlike traditional drugs, there is no way to ‘try’ wireheading. You have to submit to rather invasive surgery to get the electrode implanted. This is a big deterrent and adds a large up-front cost for beginners.
It’s also helpful that existing criminal networks don’t have the medical knowledge necessary for wireheading, as they have with chemistry for drugs. Even fairly simple brain surgery is beyond them. The technology was first demonstrated in the 1950s and 1960s but presumably still has relatively high requirements in hygiene and expertise that cannot easily be learnt.
The profit system is also somewhat more complex. A criminal network would naturally want finer control over the highs their clients receive. It would not be enough to sell the electrode implants and wait until they come back to get the battery replaced.
It’s surely possible to program these implants to require permission from a coded radio signal before having their full effect. There would be a constant small buzz accompanied by bursts of true euphoria when one particularly pleases the criminal in question, presumably when one pays their ‘subscription’. This might mean waving a radio wand over the head of the client.
Perhaps they could be dynamically remote controlled, depending on how technology advances. Real-time remote control would be ideal from the point of view of the criminal networks involved, who would face very small supply costs. Drugs have to be imported from overseas, where they are vulnerable to interdiction by law enforcement. Alternately, they must be grown in capital-intensive hidden greenhouses or laboratories.
In contrast, wireheading is certainly more capital-intensive in that the electrode manufacturing is probably more complex than manufacturing methamphetamine. This is precision engineering after all. The medical equipment and talent requirements to get started are higher. But once the capital is paid for, I estimate that profit would be higher since there would be no need to replace electrodes for years.
What should be done?
On face value, it looks like wireheading is not a big problem. It has been around since the 1960s and has caused no major crises. Should we then do nothing?
I believe this is unwise. Once there is an epidemic of addiction, then it is too late to act. Depression and other mental illnesses that wireheading can treat are on the rise globally and neuroscience is always improving. Demand is growing and supply costs are diminishing. The market will grow.
From the Atlantic article:
The two agreed to set the stimulator at three volts, which left the patient at a “normal” level of happiness and anxiety, and would not exhaust the $5,000 battery too quickly. But the next day, when the patient was to be discharged, he went to Synofzik and asked whether they might not turn the voltage up anyway before he went home. He felt fine, but he also felt that he needed to be a “little happier” in the weeks to come. The neurologist refused. The patient finally gave in and went home in his median state with an agreement to return for regular checkups.
“It is clear that doctors are not obligated to set parameters beyond established therapeutic levels just because the patient wants it,” Synofzik and his two colleagues wrote in their article. After all, patients “don’t decide how to calibrate a heart pacemaker.”
It seems the unknown young man with accumbens electrodes didn’t buy the argument because, after a short time, he stopped coming in for checkups and vanished without a trace. Maybe he found another doctor who was willing to make him happy.
Perhaps there is already a budding network out there, rogue doctors performing these operations for cash. There are certainly unscrupulous medical practices that provide opiate painkillers for cash - it has become an epidemic in the USA. Wireheading seems like a logical extension of that practice, it fulfills the same medical niche as painkillers and poses similar risks.
Naturally, more research should be conducted on this issue. Even so, there is an element of urgency. We cannot know whether wireheading will stay niche or when it will become a major issue like opiates. On the one hand, wireheading is distinctly different to opiates, heroin and amphetamines in that it is not a drug. Perhaps it will not have the same dynamics as drugs. The market dynamics are certainly distinctly different. Yet this variance could be negative as well as positive. Wireheading could become much worse than drugs as an addiction hazard. There could be nightmare scenarios where wireheading is used to enslave people via Pavlovian conditioning, associating obedience with euphoria.
I believe a cautious approach should be pursued. Wireheading could be made more inconvenient and bureaucratically less accessible. Perhaps it would only be offered to extreme, drug-resistant cases of depression, patients would have to regularly return for check-ups. Doctors would have to fill out a great deal of tedious paperwork to get permission - they would only go to such efforts if the patient truly needed it. The manufacturers of the electrodes would be regulated too, perhaps they or the doctors would face some penalties if people were addicted.
Of course, these methods would result in more depressed and suffering people going without pain relief. This seems like an unavoidable trade-off. The more patients that use the technology, the larger the expertise pool and industrial base. The more patients that use the technology, the more demand there will be to go up from 3 volts, higher and higher. More will do as the unnamed patient possibly did, seeking a doctor who has fewer qualms about upping their pleasure. The demand will create a market and suppliers will emerge.
It is entirely legitimate to conclude that the risk of addiction is an acceptable cost for the amount of pain relieved or countered by wireheading. I am not a medical expert, I do not have an expert understanding of the practicality of illicit wireheading, drug market dynamics or neuroscience generally. This article is only my opinion, based upon the similarity to opiates.
However, this matter should be brought to the attention of experts in law enforcement and medicine, to arrive upon a considered response. Is recreational wireheading even illegal in Australia? I believe not. Should it be? What regulation is there? I believe that there is none, that nobody is even thinking about the issue. This is rather concerning.