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emr comments on Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Can we finance cryogenics by revival awards?
Create a market for frozen humans. The reward is for the agent who performs the revival. Investors can either search for revival technology and patent it, or they can invest in frozen humans, which they can sell to agents who wish to attempt revival.
That sounds like an excellent plot for a dystopian horror movie.
What about revival attempts that fail such that they kill the patient? e.g. destructive scan for an upload that turns out not to be accurate enough to run? How can we discourage people from taking unnaceptable risks with our frozen bodies just to exploit us for a quick buck, without also discouraging them from trying to revise us at all?
Or which is accurate enough to run but not accurate enough to be on a meaningful level "the same person".
Oh, that could be even worse incentives-wise. As far as the patient's subjective experience goes, it's a fatal accident. As far as the people reviving them care? If the patient is alive-looking enough to collect the prize, they've succeeded and any efforts to get more accurate scanning tools involved would be a pointless waste of money.
That would be like the Wright brothers giving up the flight business as soon as they kept a craft in the air long enough for everyone to agree it was a controlled flight.
No-one ever made a profit by collecting a technology prize, still less financed a company on the expectation of a future prize. The real prize is the prestige for getting that far first, but even that won't be worth anything but a footnote in the history books if you just rest on it while everyone else goes on to make the technology really work.
If it's a technology prize, sure, but emr was suggesting prizes on each cryo-patient for each revival, not a technology prize for the first person to successfully perform a revival at all.
Ok, but if someone is subsidising successful revivals (which is what a prize on each one is), quality of the result will still matter. In a developing area of technology you can't just do something that ticks all the present checkboxes, and think you can just go on doing that. Standards will rise, and those that can't keep up will be out of business.
No, a prize is a specific way to subsidize. In particular a subsidy based on goals set when the price is formulated. Having a foundation with a budget to invest into reviving people makes more sense if you care about quality.
There's nothing to stop the foundation paying it from raising its standards over time.
People -- at least, the ones sharing the transhumanist worldview -- want revival. The people who work on revival want revival. Revival is the goal, not a few piddling millions or billions of dollars. Industrial-scale revival won't happen until people are satisfied that it really is revival; then and not before will that huge market exist. When prizes are involved, you're looking at early-stage technology, whose only reason for existing is to become mature technology.
Perhaps, but a) whether someone's actually been brought back to life successfully is hard to verify externally and they might not end up optimising for it even accidentally since the incentivised tech development is for the same quality but cheaper and faster and b) probably a lot of people would be killed by this practice in the time between "revival" becoming possible and standards getting high enough that it's actually reviving people and not killing the original and creating someone new, so the prize thing still sounds like a bad idea.