So, lowering frustration and helping raising levels of serotonin and endorphins, even by using tech, is intrinsically good for the world.
Also, it seems that an active sex life (be it with tech or not) is not dangerous for health.
The only reserve could be the tech pollution of badly discarded toys etc, but that has solutions.
PS: Also -- bodily happiness can improve creativity, thus actually indirectly helping advances in other scientific domains.
Sex toys, porn, and enculturing cowardice stave off the war, I guess. You just get Elliot Roger instead.
And, with long-distance relationships, smart sex-toys can facilitate the more intimate times in a more fulfilling way than standard phone or type-sex.
A loving and committed couple could, while apart due to, perhaps, a conference or business trip or anything else, enjoy the company of one-another in that way perfectly well.
It's all this talk of poorly susbtituting emotional bonds with simulacra that annoys me. Seems like a motte-and-bailey.
Oh, it's for couples! Now let's go back to selling our subscription model AI anime girlfriend
In your wording it only looks like it is the exploitation of people by businessmen selling the happiness as a product, whereas it can actually be the user themselves developing it for their purposes (like when it's opensource, hackable, or even DIY, etc).
Anyway, my vision of the future is hundreds of millions of obese NEETS who spend their entire monthly UBI check on overpriced insect-protein food, clothing, video, porn and AI girlfriend-as-a-service products. Pigs at the trough, given just enough slop that they don't kill themselves, while the people who can resist temptation (say, helped along by their upbringing) get to be human.
It is true, but somewhat orthogonal to other problems such as how to reach happiness. As an intellectual leaning person, I tend (like you) to link my own happiness to greater ability of my mind, but that is absolutely not generalizable. For some other people, the notion is true but only regarding "to improve physical abilities", and they don't care about the other parameters. etc.
Moreover, the highlighted problem of instant gratification thus applies not only to sexual needs, but also to feeding needs, for example. It would be interesting to compare foraging/hunting societies with ours in this regard.
Also you start to see (unmanned) virtual characters sophisticated enough to trigger emotions of love, and in some case commitment. It is clearly still extreme and a bit too early, but in the near future I can see people becoming really in fond of their virtual AI character partner.
We agree that not only immediate endorphins levels, but also mid and long term serotonin levels, are important for happiness, and I think that this connected tech is helping in the right way.
Which kinda makes me sad because VRC is an absolute nightmare to work with. Can we please all move to NeosVR? :3
And, I'm not personally building any of this, it just already exists, and some people are enjoying it.
Heck, it is even being developed and hacked by the users themselves, when it is hackable, like in this very HN post.
Sounds like you just want everybody to be happy only your way...
Even without this kind of tech, the paths for happiness are probably beyond everything your little window of a mind can imagine.
PS: it looks like somebody has called their local church's friends to retaliate on this how unholly HN thread, and they come up here and create new accounts and answer my comments without even realizing that I am not the OP...
People who don't need it just won't use it.
It's not a "smoker / passive smoker" effect, they will not disturb other people.
All the side-effects are a result from the War on Drugs: not knowing the purity of the batch, adultered products, and so forth. This is why accidental overdoses happen. This is why it is bad for your health for the most part, because God knows with what it is mixed. Intentional overdoses happen too, but that happens with OTC medications, too, so heroin is not so special in that regard.
My point was that, in the current context, the use or heroin is hazardous -- in our current society, for most people -- which is not the case for virtual sex and related toys (if not horribly dysfunctional).
I do not know much about virtual sex. What are the possibilities and limitations of virtual sex today?
Not virtual but still weird in another dimension, there are also animated realistic sex dolls.
I see these cardboard sex-simulacra trapping, for example, young men in local optima where they never go and talk to a real girl- even young men who could, if they tried, and who'd be happier in the end for it.
Anything that increases the number of incels in the world is a bad thing, for everyone.
looks at Project Melody
I got some bad news.
(This is not to say I'm pro-virtual-emodel or whatever the current name for this is, but it's definitely a thing, and it's definitely popular)