Well, in some sense, achieving happiness by anything other than reproduction, is already wireheading.
No. This reduces the words to the point of meaninglessness. Human beings have values other than reproduction, values that make them happy when satisfied - art, pride, personal achievement, understanding, etc. Wireheading is about being made happy directly, regardless of the satisfaction of the various values.
The scenario previously discussed about Felix is that he was happy and everyone else suffered. Now you're posing a scenario where everyone is happy, but they're made happy by having their values rewritten to place extremelty value on Felix's happiness instead.
At this point, I hope we're not pretending it's the same scenario with only minor modifications, right? Your scenario is about the AI rewriting our values, it's not about trading our collective suffering for Felix's happiness.
Your scenario can effectively remove the person of Felix from the situation altogether, and the AI could just make us all very happy that the laws of physics keep on working.
You say art... what if I am a musician and I am making a song? That's good, right? What if I get 100 experimental subjects to sit in MRI, as they listen to test music, and using my intelligence and some software tools, make very pleasurable song? What if I know that it works by activating such and such connections here and there which end up activating the reward system? What if I don't use MRI, but use internal data available in my own brain, to achieve same result?
I know that this is arriving at meaninglessness, I just don't see it as reducing the words ...
I laughed: SMBC comic.