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MugaSofer comments on I Will Pay $500 To Anyone Who Can Convince Me To Cancel My Cryonics Subscription - Less Wrong
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Comments (181)
Cryonics success is an highly conjunctive event, depending on a number of different, roughly independent, events to happen.
Consider this list:
Cryocompanies actually implement the cryorpreservation process susbstantially as advertised, without botching or faking it, or generally behaving incompetently. I think there is a significant (>= 50%) probability that they don't: there have been anecdotal allegations of mis-behavior, at least one company (the Cryonics Institute) has policies that betray gross incompetence or disregard for the success of the procedure ( such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks ), and more generally, since cryocompanies operate without public oversight and without any mean to assess the quality of their work, they have every incentive to hide mistakes, take cost-saving shortcuts, use sub-par materials, equipment, unqualified staff, or even outright defraud you.
Assuming that the process has actually preserved the relevant information, technology for recover it and revive you in some way must be developed. Guessing about future technology is difficult. Historically, predicted technological advances that seemed quite obvious at some point (AGI, nuclear fusion power, space colonization, or even flying cars and jetpacks) failed to materialize, while actual technological improvements were often not widely predicted many years in advance (personal computers, cellphones, the Internet, etc.). The probability that technology many years from now goes along a trajectory we can predict is low.
Assuming that the tech is eventually developed, it must be sufficiently cheap, and future people must have an incentive to use it to revive you. It's unclear what such an incentive could be. Revival of a few people for scientific purposes, even at a considerable cost, seems plausible, but mass revival of >thousands frozen primitives?
Your cryocompany must not suffer financial failure, or some other significant local disruption, before the tech becomes available and economically affordable. Very few organizations survive more than one century, and those which do, often radically alter their mission. Even worse, it is plausible that before revival tech becomes available, radical life extension becomes available, and therefore people stop signing up for cryonics. Cryocompanies might be required to go on for many decades or centuries without new customers. It's unclear that they could remain financially viable and motivated in this condition. The further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that your cryocompany will still exist.
Regional or planetary disasters, either natural (earthquake, flood, hurricane, volcanic eruption, asteroid strike, etc.) or human-made (war, economic crisis, demographic crisis due to environmental collapse, etc.) must not disrupt your preservation. Some of these disaster are exceptional, other hit with a certain regularity over the course of a few centuries. Again, the further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that a disaster will destroy your frozen remains before.
You can play with assigning probabilities to these events and multiplying them. I don't recommend trusting too much any such estimate due to the fact that it is easy to fool yourself into a sense of false precision while picking numbers that suit whatever you already wanted to believe.
But the takeaway point is that in order to cryonics to succeed, many things have to happen or be true in succession, and the failure of only one of them would make cryonics ultimately fail at reviving you. Therefore, I think, cryonics success is so improbable that it is not worth the cost.
Woah, really? This seems ... somewhat worse than my estimation. (Note that I am not signed up, for reasons that have nothing to do with this.)
This is a good point that I hadn't heard before.
http://www.alcor.org/cases.html A loooot of them include things going wrong, pretty clear signs that this is a novice operation with minimal experience, and so forth. Also notice that they don't even HAVE case reports for half the patients admitted prior to ~2008.
It's worth noting that pretty much all of these have a delay of at LEAST a day. There's one example where they "cryopreserved" someone who had been buried for over a year, against the wishes of the family, because "that is what the member requested." (It even includes notes that they don't expect it to work, but the family is still $50K poorer!)
I'm not saying they're horrible, but they really come off as enthusiastic amateurs, NOT professionals. Cryonics might work, but the modern approach is ... shoddy at best, and really doesn't strike me as matching the optimistic assumptions of people who advocate for it.
Yikes. Yeah, that seems like a serious problem that needs more publicity in cryonics circles.
I think it's also worth considering that a society of people who rarely die would probably have population issues, as there is a limited carrying capacity.
That's most obvious in the case of biologic humans, where even with our normal lifespan, we are already close or even above carrying capacity. In more exotic (and thus less probable, IMHO) scenarios such as Hansonian brain emulations, the carrying capacity might be perhaps higher, but it would still be fixed, or at least it would increase slowly once all the easily reachable resources on earth have been put to use (barring, of course, extreme singularity scenarios where nanomagicbots turn Jupiter into "computronium" or something, which I consider highly improbable).
Thus, if the long-lived future people are to avoid continuous cycles of population overshoot and crash, they must have some way of enforcing a population cap, whether by market forces or government regulation. This implies that reviving cryopreserved people would probably have costs other than those of the revival tech. Whoever revives you would have to split in some way their share of resources with you (or maybe in the extreme case, commit suicide to make room for you).
Hanson, for instance, predicts that his brain emulation society would be a Malthusian subsistence economy. I don't think that such a society could afford to ever revive any significant number of cryopatients, even if they had the technology (how Hanson can believe that society is likely and be still signed up for cryonics, is beyond my understanding).
Even if you don't think that a Malthusian scenario is likely, it still likely that the future will be an approximately steady-state economy, which means it would be strong disincentives against adding more people.
I'm inclined to agree, actually, but I would expect a post-scarcity "steady-state economy" large enough that absorbing such a tiny number of people is negligible.
With that said:
Honestly, it doesn't sound all that implausible that humans will find ways to expand - if nothing else, without FTL (I infer you don't anticipate FTL) there's pretty much always going to be a lot of unused universe out there for many billions of years to come (until the universe expands enough we can't reach anything, I guess.)
Brain emulations sound extremely plausible. In fact, the notion that we will never get them seems ... somewhat artificial in it's constraints. Are you sure you aren't penalizing them merely for sounding "exotic"?
I can't really comment on turning Jupiter into processing substrate and living there, but ... could you maybe throw out some numbers regarding the amounts of processing power and population numbers you're imagining? I think I have a higher credence for "extreme singularity scenarios" than you do, so I'd like to know where you're coming from better.
That ... is strange. Actually, has he talked anywhere about his views on cryonics?
Obviously I don't anticipate FTL. Do you?
Yes, but exploiting resources in our solar system is already difficult and costly. Currently there is nothing in space worth the cost of going there or bringing it back, maybe in the future it will be different, but I expect progress to be relatively slow.
Interstellar colonization might be forever physically impossible or economically unfeasible. Even if it is feasible I expect it to be very very slow. I think that's the best solution to Fermi's paradox.
Tom Murphy discussed these issue here and here. He focused on proven space technology (rockets) and didn't analyze more speculative stuff like mass drivers, but it seems to me that his whole analysis is reasonable.
I'm penalizing them because they seem to be far away from what current technology allows (consider the current status of the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project).
It's unclear how many hidden hurdles are there, and how long Moore's law will continue to hold. Even if the emulation of a few human brains becomes possible, it's unclear that the technology would scale to allow a population of billions, or trillions as Hanson predicts. Keep in mind that biological brains are much more energy efficient than modern computers.
Conditionally on radical life extension technology being available, brain emulation is more probable, since it seems to be an obvious avenue to radical life extension. But it's not obvious that it would be cheap and scalable.
I think the most likely scenario, at least for a few centuries, is that human will still be essentially biological and will only inhabit the Earth (except possibly for a few Earth-dependent outposts in the solar system). Realistic population sizes will be between 2 and 10 billions.
Total processing power is more difficult to estimate: it depends on how long Moore's law (and related trends such as Koomey's law) will continue to hold. Since there seem to be physical limits that would be hit in 30-40 years of continued exponential growth, I would estimate that 20 years is a realistic time frame. Then there is the question of how much energy and other resources people will invest into computation.
I'd say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable. Novel hardware technologies might change that, but as usual probabilities on speculative future tech should be discounted.
From Wikipedia:
It's already happening.
Current process size is ~22nm, silicon lattice size is ~0.5nm . Something around 5..10 nm is the limit for photolithography, and we don't have any other methods of bulk manufacturing in sight. The problem with individual atoms is that you can't place them in bulk because of the stochastic nature of the interactions.
Prediction confirmed, then. I think you might be surprised how common anticipating that we will eventually "solve FTL" using "wormholes", some sort of Alcubierre variant or plain old Clarke-esque New Discoveries - in sciencey circles, anyway.
I ... see. OK then.
That seems like a more plausible objection.
Hmm. I started to calculate out some stuff, but I just realized: all that really matters is how the amount of humans we can support compares to available human-supporting resources, be they virtual, biological or, I don't know, some sort of posthuman cyborg.
So: how on earth can we calculate this?
We could use population projections - I understand the projected peak is around 2100 at 9 billion or so - but those are infamously unhelpful for futurists and, obviously, may not hold when some technology or another is introduced.
So ... what about wildly irresponsible economic speculation? What's your opinion of the idea we'll end up in a "post-scarcity economy", due to widespread automation etc.
Alternatively, do you think the population controls malthusians have been predicting since forever will finally materialize?
Or ... basically I'm curious as to the sociological landscape you anticipate here.
As long as we are talking about biologic humans (I don't think anything else is likely, at least for a few centuries), then carrying capacity is most likely in the order of billions: each human requires a certain amount of food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare, etc. The technologies we use to provide these things are already highly efficient, hence their efficiency will probably not grow much, at least not by incremental improvement.
Groundbreaking developments comparable to the invention of agriculture might make a difference, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious candidate for that which we can foresee, hence I wouldn't consider that likely.
In optimistic scenarios, we get an approximately steady state (or slowly growing) economy with high per capita wealth, with high automation relieving many people from the necessity of working long hours, or perhaps even of working at all.
In pessimistic scenarios, Malthusian predictions come true, and we get either steady state economy at subsistence level, or growth-collapse oscillations with permanent destruction of carrying capacity due to resource depletion, climate change, nuclear war, etc. up to the most extreme scenarios of total civilization breakdown or human extinction.
This is certainly not true for healthcare.
I think that making energy really cheap ("too cheap to meter") is foreseeable and that would count as a groundbreaking development.
Do you think that modern healthcare is inefficient in energy and resource usage? Why?
What energy source you have in mind?
I think that modern healthcare is inefficient in general cost/benefit terms: what outputs you get at the cost of which inputs. Compared to what seems achievable in the future, of course.
Fusion reactors, for example.