Synthetic Pleasures

By Ian Sample

Editor in Chief

f I were stranded on a desert island, the only thing I would want, would be a computer with a net connection. In the ever expanding computer industry there was recently a film that approached the computational extremes, "Synthetic Pleasures." Only it did not stop at the computation extremes but continued on to reconstructed environments and smart drugs.

Imagine a family vacation to the beach. You load up the car with the beach towels and sun screen. You bring a knee board for you kids to play on. You drive across town toward a huge domed building. Your family carts all your possessions to the door where you take off your coat and walk inside to the beach. Ah, the beauty of a beach minus all the hazards, no sharks, no riptide, and clean water.

This sort of controlled environment appears to be a trend. Look at Las Vegas, and you can take tours of the ancient pyramids!?! How is that? We've reconstructed a portion of them to help entice you to gamble. Think of all the money you save by visiting Vegas as opposed to Egypt.

It almost seems that once we can simulate everything we won't have the need to have it around any more. So now we have physical simulated environments, but what about environments that are completely imaginary? "The one thing I want out of virtual reality is to hug my daughter in Colorado and have her feel it in California." Other people see VR as an escape from the harshness of reality, similar to drug use. The nice thing about VR then, is the "controlled trips." No longer do you have to have painful visuals, you can have a sugar coated trip.

That brings us to the use of smart drugs. Up to this point in our medical history, we have really only used drugs for curing of an illness. However, there seems to be a trend of personality altering or intelligence enhancing drugs. We have seen the effects of prozac, "a very crude form of personality alteration." But we now have the opportunity to take drugs to enhance our memory, our thought randomness, our energy, and on and on. "Someday we will probably be able to download our personalities, uploading is a different kind of problem, but downloading should be pretty easy."

So now we are faced with a new situation, some call it a cop out from reality. Others call it an alternative form of pleasure. But soon when someone asks you if you've ever wanted to fly high, you can say yes without unpleasant side-effects.