jaimeastorga2000 comments on Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future - Less Wrong

6 Post author: gworley 23 June 2010 02:33PM

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Comment author: gwern 23 June 2010 04:09:43PM *  18 points [-]

Writing is extremely low-bandwidth. If I recall correctly, Shannon did some experimentation and found that per letter, English was no more than a bit and I've seen other estimates that it's less than a bit, per letter. (In comparison, depending on language and encoding, a character can take up to 32 bits to store uncompressed. Even ASCII requires 8 bits/1 byte per character.) And given the difficulty of producing a megabyte of personal information, and the vast space of potential selves...

If we're going to try to preserve ourselves through recorded information, wouldn't it make much more sense to instead spend a few hundred/thousand dollars on lifelogging? If you really do record your waking hours, then preservation of your writings is automatically included - as well as all the other stuff. Plus, this solves the issue of mundane experiences.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 November 2011 02:36:44AM -1 points [-]

If we're going to try to preserve ourselves through recorded information, wouldn't it make much more sense to instead spend a few hundred/thousand dollars on lifelogging?

But that does not have the advantages over cryonics that gworley uses to argue for writing. Cryonics at its cheapest costs $1250 for a lifetime CI membership plus the recurring life insurance payments. An initial investment on lifelogging combined with the periodical maintaining and/or replacing of equipment ought to be comparable (although you could count on technological advancement to bring these costs down as time goes on). And I don't think lifelogging is significantly more socially acceptable than cryonics.

Comment author: gwern 09 November 2011 02:35:02PM 1 point [-]

Cryonics at its cheapest costs $1250 for a lifetime CI membership plus the recurring life insurance payments.

The membership is not even the costliest part. The insurance costs you a hard drive a month or more, and per Kryder's law and general consumer electronics, the disparity gets worse every year as the cost of lifelogging drops like a stone. Alcor runs at an annual loss and by definition is underpricing its services; I suspect CI is. Inflation is a major issue which will push up prices much higher than they currently are, which is what the current wrangling over 'grandfathering' is about - people have bought far too little insurance.

tl;dr: cryonics is more expensive than lifelogging. Cryonics will only get more expensive; lifelogging will only get cheaper. You do the math.