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lsparrish comments on The True Rejection Challenge - Less Wrong
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The singularity (or the technological state we roughly mean by it) could easily depend on centuries of continued incremental research. Moore's Law is coming up against some fundamental barriers. Furthermore, it may be advisable to slow the approach of the singularity for precautionary reasons (e.g. by restricting access to the most powerful hardware), as a bad singularity is to be avoided pretty much at all costs.
Cryonics also doesn't depend directly on a singularity, just either very good (compared to today) scan/emulate tech or very good cell repair tech. These involve progress in different areas of science, so one might be a dead end whereas the other turns out to work.
Supporting cryonics as a younger person (whether by signing up or by supporting it from the sidelines) could result in earlier development of hypothermia and other related biochemical alternatives, eliminating the need for cryonics as we know it. Instead you could conceivably enter a state of hibernation as you near old age, for a few years at a time, until a cure for aging is developed.
So you would recommend signing up at 16, even if my personal odds of dying now are pretty small?
What would you estimate as the probability of developing technology that will make cryonics work without a singularity?
I haven't signed up myself yet, and I'm 28, so it would be suspicious if I recommended this. (My reasons for not doing so are somewhere between financial and "ugh, paperwork.") But I do recommend becoming actively involved in the cryonics specific subset of the transhumanism community and making long-term financial plans with this expense in mind.
I assign perhaps 65% likelihood to that, assuming we rule out long-range as well as short-range singularities, and assuming something like today's best cryonics quality levels. The added risk is because a) the ceiling for non-singularity tech might be lower (it sort of rule out matrioshka brain kind of stuff, if that is relevant), and b) non-singularity tech could take longer to reach high enough levels (even as compared to distant singularities) which increases storage-time associated risks. The latter kind can be mitigated to some degree by increasing storage security -- but it would have to be very close to arbitrarily low to survive for multiple thousands of years.
The likelihood of it working climbs to closer to 100% (or at least towards the chances of curing aging, which I think are in the high 90%'s in the long run, even without a singularity) if the cryostasis technology improves during our lifetimes, as the problems of cooling can then be resolved sooner and with less chance of being inherently unsolvable (for any given technological ceiling).