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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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You've been in the transhumanist community for, what, at least 10 years?
I honestly have no clue what could possibly be going wrong in your mind at this moment. I do not understand what general category of malfunction corresponds to this particular mistake.
You haven't explained how it's a mistake in any way. It's an extrapolation of motives that are far different than yours, but they do not seem inherently ridiculously implausible.
Certainly is it true that we're probably not vitrifying people in the best way. Once we know how to devitrify people, we'll probably know a lot more about how to vitrify them best.
Phil, my response to your argument is this:
In order for cryonics to work in principle, they will already have to know how to fix whatever you died of, whether it be cancer or a heart attack or being crushed in a car accident. How much more difficult do you estimate it would be to fix the problem of vitrification (fixing vitrification damage and preventing de-vitrfication damage) than fix the cause of your death?
You don't indicate a probability. Do you think it is more likely that the revival of present-day cryonics patients will be delayed with respect to those frozen later, than actually never revived? (Given that revival is eventually possible for people frozen correctly.)
First, I estimate it will be orders of magnitude harder to fix that damage than to fix the cause of death. Fixing cancer or many other diseases would likely be a matter of intervening with drugs or genes. Fixing damage from freezing or vitrifying is usually held to require advanced nanotechnology.
Second, I think that there will be continued motivation for work to progress on all those things (cancer, heart attacks, etc.), and so the technology for fixing them will continue to improve. But the technology for fixing the damage is not likely to continue to improve, because (warm) people won't have a need for it.
Good. I agree with you that fixing vitrifying damage could require advanced nanotechnology and that fixing causes of the death might not.
However, I'd like to linger a moment longer on the latter. Suppose someone has died of cancer and been vitrified in a 'good' way that is easy to undo. Presumably, gene therapy and drugs would work to cure their cancer if they were well. However, they've died. What was the cause of death? To what extent is it likely that cells been damaged? Can we anticipate what might be required to make them feel well again?
Also, you didn't comment on whether you thought a delay was more likely than no revival at all for persons inconveniently vitrified.
Let me build on this. You say (and I agree) that fixing the damage caused by vitrification is much harder than fixing most causes of death. Thus, by the time that devitrification is possible, very few new people will be vitrified (only people who want a one-way trip to the future).
This leads me to 2 conclusions: 1) Most revivals will be of people who were frozen prior to the invention of the revivification technology. Therefore, if anyone is revived, it is because people want to revive people from the past. 2) The supply of people frozen with a given technology (who are willing to be revived, as opposed to the "one-way trip" bodies) will pretty much only decrease.
Assuming people continue to want revive people from the past, they will quickly run out of the easy revivals. If they still want to revive more people, they will have strong incentives to develop new revivification technologies.
That's a reasonable scenario. As time goes on, though, you run into a lot more what-ifs. At some point, the technology will be advanced enough that they can extract whatever information they want from your brain without reviving you.
I think it would be really interesting to talk to Hitler. But I wouldn't do this by reviving Hitler and setting him loose. I'd keep him contained, and turn him off afterwards. Is the difference between yourself and Hitler large compared to the difference between yourself and a future post-Singularity AI possessing advanced nanotechnology?
Seems to me it's implicitly an example of the common category "assuming that charity (or FAI) will not be an important factor in revival".
There are many possible future worlds. Obviously I'm not speaking of possible futures in which a magical FAI can do anything you ask of it.
A sizable fraction of possible futures may contain AIs for which solving these problems are trivial, or societies with so much wealth that they can mount massive research projects for charity or fun. But the fraction of those possible futures in which reviving frozen humans is thought of as an admirable goal might not be large.
My point estimate is that, if you wanna get revived, you have to get revived before the singularity, because you're not going to have much value afterwards.
20, my young friend.
And that should suggest to you that the mistake may be yours.
It's certainly evidence in favour of that position, but not enough...