= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Soki comments on The Threat of Cryonics - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (212)
I am against cryonics, and here's why (though I would love to hear a rebuttal):
Cryonics seems inherently, and destructively, to the human race, grossly selfish. Not only is cryonics a huge cost that could be spent elsewhere helping others, nature and evolution thrive on the necessity of refreshing the population of each species. Though it's speculation, I would assign the probability of evolution continuing to work (and improve) on the human race as pretty high - what gain does the human species have in preserving humans from the 21st century indefinitely, when 23rd century or later humans are better?
Overall, in no way can I think of cryonics benefiting anyone other than the individual's (I think simply genetic) desire to avoid death (maybe it benefits future anthropologists I guess), and the cost of cryonics, given that, is what turns me off so much. I can understand people indulging themselves every once in a while, but since I tend to think gratuitous selfishness is a bad thing for the human race, I find myself understanding cryonic-phobic people more than cryonics-supporters.
Is this an invalid view?
I just made a small calculation :
The number of deaths in the US is about 2.5 million per year.
The cost of cryonics is about $30000 per "patient" with the Cryonics Institute.
So if everyone wanted to be frozen, it would cost 75 billion dollars a year, about 0.5% of the US GDP, or 3% of the healthcare spending.
This neglects the economies of scales which could greatly reduce the price.
So even with a low probability of success, cryonics seems to be a good choice.
I don't think comparing total cost of cryonics to the total cost of healthcare is useful.
We need to consider just the cost of those aspects of healthcare which would no longer be required if we have a cryonics-friendly population: life-saving operations with a high-chance of failure, and end-of-life curative care (attempting to extend lifespan but only for a short while) and palliative care (reducing suffering as people near death).
After some brief googling, I was unable to find much information on expenditures specifically for the above categories, but I can at least find an upper bound. According to this chart, nursing home expenses account for 6.1% of US health care expenses, and hospital care accounts for 30.4%. Guessing that most nursing patients are reasonable candidates for cryonics, and that most hospital expenses are for very serious cases (since less urgent problems can be handled at a clinic), that sets an upper bound of healthcare costs which would be cut by cryonics at 36.5% of 2 trillion, 730 billion, of which the estimated cryonics cost is still only about 10%.
So cryonics still seems to come out ahead, provided my stated assumptions bear out fairly well.
I don't think this quiet answers jtold's problem though. What about when all these cryogenically frozen people will be unfrozen? What about refreshing each generation / where each generation starts anew so to speak?
When the people are unfrozen, it's reasonable to think that medical technology will be advanced enough not only to cure them of whatever was about to kill them, but to do so fairly inexpensively. So, there's a net reduction in resource usage by cryogenically freezing people.
One way for me to support that is by referencing the accelerating rate of technological improvement, but a simpler argument is that if it weren't yet cheap to cure the frozen people at a given date, there wouldn't be very much motivation for the people of that time period to unfreeze them.
Plus, even if the cost were the same later on as it is now, there's certainly benefit in spending more resources to fix the problems that are immediate existential threats (i.e. environmental disaster, global nuclear conflict, some here would say unfriendly AI) and saving those problems which can wait indefinitely for later.
I don't think jtold's other reason really makes much sense: he's concerned about reducing the rate of evolutionary change in humanity, but cryogenics wouldn't stop new people from being born, just keep the old people around as well. The gene pool will keep on churning.
More importantly, and as other people on this thread have pointed out, why is evolutionary change worth preserving? Medical science is much faster and can arrive at all the same desirable goals, i.e. reducing genetic diseases and enhancing human capabilities. Plus, evolution punishes individuals with suffering in order to achieve its broader goals, while medical science advances both the welfare of each individual and of the species as a whole.