Roko comments on Abnormal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Comments (365)
Roko:
This is another issue where, in my view, pro-cryonics people often make unwarranted assumptions. They imagine a future with a level of technology sufficient to revive frozen people, and assume that this will probably mean a great increase in per-capita wealth and comfort, like today's developed world compared to primitive societies, only even more splendid. Yet I see no grounds at all for such a conclusion.
What I find much more plausible are the Malthusian scenarios of the sort predicted by Robin Hanson. If technology becomes advanced enough to revive frozen brains in some way, it probably means that it will be also advanced enough to create and copy artificial intelligent minds and dexterous robots for a very cheap price. [Edit to avoid misunderstanding: the remainder of the comment is inspired by Hanson's vision, but based on my speculation, not a reflection of his views.]
This seems to imply a Malthusian world where selling labor commands only the most meager subsistence necessary to keep the cheapest artificial mind running, and biological humans are out-competed out of existence altogether. I'm not at all sure I'd like to wake up in such a world, even if rich -- and I also see some highly questionable assumptions in the plans of people who expect that they can simply leave a posthumous investment, let the interest accumulate while they're frozen, and be revived rich. Even if your investments remain safe and grow at an immense rate, which is itself questionable, the price of lifestyle that would be considered tolerable by today's human standards may well grow even more rapidly as the Malthusian scenario unfolds.
That's a risk for regular death, too, albeit a very unlikely one. This possibility seems like Pascal's wager with a minus sign.
That said, I am nowhere near certain that bad future awaits us, nor that the above mentioned Malthusian scenario is inevitable. However, it does seem to me as the most plausible course of affairs given a cheap technology for making and copying minds, and it seems reasonable to expect that such technology would follow from more or less the same breakthroughs that would be necessary to revive people from cryonics.