If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived? Talking to people at LessWrong meetups I've heard estimates of 1 in 2. My friend George Dahl, whose opinion I respect a lot, guesses "less than 1 in 10^6". Niether has given me reasons, those numbers are opaque. My estimate of these odds pretty much determines whether I should sign up. I could afford $300/year, and I would if I thought the odds were 1:2, but not if they were 1:10^6. [1]
In order to see how likely this is to work, we should look at the process. I would sign up with a cryonics company and for life insurance. I'd go on living, enjoying my life and the people around me, paying my annual fees, until some point when I died. After death they would drain my blood, replace it with something that doesn't rupture cell walls when it freezes, freeze me in liquid nitrogen, and leave me there for a long time. At some point, probably after the development of nanotechnology, people would revive me, probably as a computer program.
There's a lot of steps there, and it's easy to see ways they could go wrong. [3] Let's consider some cases and try to get probabilities [4]:
Update: the probabilities below are out of date, and only useful for understanding the comments. I've made a spreadsheet listing both my updated probabilities and those for as many other people as I can find: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...
| 0.03 | You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance |
| 0.10 | Something happens to you financially where you can no longer afford this |
| 0.06 | You die suddenly or in a circumstance where you would not be able to be frozen in time (see leading causes of death) |
| 0.04 | You die of something like Altzheimers where the brain is degraded at death (Altzheimers is much more common than brain cancer) |
| 0.01 | The cryonics company is temporarily out of capacity and cannot actually take you, perhaps because lots of people died at once |
| 0.02 | The life insurance company does not pay out, perhaps it's insolvent, perhaps it argues you're not dead yet |
| 0.02 | You die in a hospital that refuses access to you by the cryonics people |
| 0.02 | After death your relatives reject your wishes and don't let the cryonics people freeze you |
| 0.10 | Some law is passed that prohibits cryonics (before you're even dead) |
| 0.20 | The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?) |
| 0.20 | Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain |
| 0.50 | The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything |
| 0.35 | Other (there are always other things that can go wrong) |
| 0.86 | Something goes wrong in getting you frozen |
|---|
| 0.30 | All people die (nuclear war? comet strike? nanotech?) |
| 0.20 | Society falls apart (remember this is the chance that society will fall apart given that we did not see "all people die") |
| 0.10 | Some time after you die cryonics is outlawed |
| 0.15 | All cryonics companies go out of business |
| 0.30 | The cryonics company you chose goes out of business |
| 0.05 | Your cryonics company screws something up and you are defrosted (power loss, perhaps. Are we really expecting perfect operation for decades?) |
| 0.30 | Other |
| 0.80 | Something goes wrong in keeping you frozen |
|---|
| 0.10 | It is impossible to extract all the information preseved in the frozen brain |
| 0.50 | The technology is never developed to extract the information |
| 0.30 | No one is interested in my brain's information |
| 0.40 | It is too expensive to extract my brain's information |
| 0.03 | Reviving people in simulation is impossible |
| 0.20 | The technology is never developed to run people in simulation |
| 0.10 | Running people in simulation is outlawed |
| 0.10 | No one is interested running me in simulation (even though they were interested enough to extract the neccesary information from my frozen brain) |
| 0.05 | It is too expensive to run me in simulation (if we get this far I expect cheap powerful computers) |
| 0.40 | Other |
| 0.93 | Something goes wrong in reviving |
|---|
| 0.05 | Other |
| 0.05 | Something else goes wrong |
|---|
Combined Probability Of Failure: 99.82%
Odds of success: 1 in 567.
If you can think of other ways cryonics might fail, moving probability mass from "other" to something more quantifiable, that would be helpful. If you think my numbers are off for something, please let me know what a better number would be and why. This is not final.
Am I going about this right? Do people here who think it's rational to sign up for cryonics take a "the payoff is really high, so the small probability doesn't matter" view? Am I overly pessimistic about its chances of success?
Note: I originally posted this on my blog, and the version there has a silly javascript calculator for playing with the probabilities.
[1] To figure out what odds I would accept, I think the right approach is to treat this as if I were considering signing up for something certain and see how much I would pay, then see what odds bring this below $300/year. Even at 1:2 odds this is less effective than Village Reach at averting death [2], so this needs to come out of my 'money spent on me' budget. I think $10,000/year is about the most I'd be willing to spend. It's a lot, but not dying would be pretty nice. This means I'd need odds of 1:33 to sign up.
[2] Counter argument: you should care about quality adjusted life years and not deaths averted. Someone revived maybe should expect to have millenia of life at very high quality. This seems less likely to me than just the claim "will be revived". A lot less likely.
[3] In order to deal with independence issues, all my probability guesses are conditional on everything above them not happening. Each of these things must go right, so this works. For example, society collapsing and my cryonics organization going out of business are very much not independent. So the probability assigned to the latter is the chance that society won't collapse, but my organization goes out of business anyway. This means I can just multiply up the subelements to get probabilities for sections, and then multiply up sections to get an overall probability.
[4] This has a lot in common with the Warren formula, which was inspired by the Drake equation. Robin Hanson also has a breakdown. I also found a breakdown on LessWrong that seems really optimistic.
EDIT 2011-09-26: jsalvatier suggested an online spreadsheet, which is very sensible. Created
EDIT 2011-09-27: I've updated my probabilities some, and made the updates on the spreadsheet.
I would put those at significantly more likely than even the pessimistic author had. After all, where on earth would the money come from to bring you back?
Imagine that your favorite cryonics company (Alcor/TransTime/CryonicsInstitute/etc) existed back in 1911 and has finally discovered how to thaw people, 100 years later. They magically came across the process back then and there's warehouses full of people who can come back if the company spends a modest sum of $50,000 on the revival (which is a way, way, way, way low estimate). Their contracts back in 1911 were exactly the same as current ones.
The first couple would get thawed out as proof the tech works; the next few would be celebrities or people who have still-surviving rich family; after that nobody else would get thawed. Why would they? Nobody's going to care about the rights of someone 100 years dead. There wouldn't be a huge interest group interested in bringing back hundred year old corpses. Modern society wouldn't want these people, who are racist, sexist, superstitious, have zero job skills, have zero life skills, and would cost enormous amounts to social services before they're productive members of society (if they ever adapt). They wouldn't even have advertising value to draw more signups; by the time cryonics is successfully pulled off, people won't need cryonics anymore, so there's no revenue stream to bring people back.
Cryonics hinges on more than just surviving all the small P values of danger like power outages or global extinctions. It means actively hoping that humanity gets through the singularity intact, gets to post-scarcity intact, and undergoes a moral revolution intact. It means society must have the knowledge, resources, and will to bring some stranger into the world with absolutely zero value other than novelty.
Cryonics relies on a very narrow bullseye of possible futures. I love the thought of cryonics being a net that catches everyone that died before their time then raising them to paradise, like the Bible's pre-Christ purgatory. But that's not how the current world works. And unless we make headway on creating a friendly singularity, that's not how it'll ever work.
Edit: Edited after looking into Alcor's finances and double checking that they do not, in fact, set aside money for resurrection beyond the 25-110,000 to keep you cold.
The money would come from interest. Presumably, the company would be set up in such a way that they can't use the money for thawing until they thaw you out.
If Alcor doesn't set aside money, and doesn't let the money set aside for freezing that doesn't end up being used get used as such, I'd suggest either finding a place that does, or just setting up a trust yourself. Make it accrue interest until it reaches a given amount accounting for deflation, and donate the interest to charity or something, then make it pay off to Alcor, or whoever thaws you, when th... (read more)