I've been thinking about this a lot for similar reasons, and one thing I've been concerned about is the market for human whole-brain emulations. A lot of the examples in this thread are horror stories that seem to me to lack clear pathways to their actual realization. (That would be bad, but how would it actually happen?) However, this seems like a very plausible pathway to some very bad futures for cryonics patients. There has always been an active market for humans (and I do mean as property, not for human services). It was moral progress to ban slavery, but slavery remains in the modern guise of human trafficking. Why should we not expect to observe the same phenomenon in a future with WBEs? The ideal solution in my eyes is a Friendly AI that enforces ethical regulations on WBEs as quasi-natural law, but even that brings up some ethical questions about personal freedom and privacy. It would be a mistake to say that WBE is more likely to come before AI, but we are more certain about WBE timelines than superintelligent AI timelines, and our desideratum is the plausibility that a given emerging technology will cause bad futures for cryonics patients. There are clear brute-force pathways to WBE: increase scanning resolution and make the primitives in your model as fundamental as possible so that you can trade computation for understanding. If there is not already a singleton to regulate WBEs when they are invented, then all it takes is one person who has access to the emulation and the means to copy it. It's conceivable that for many purposes, emulations would be quite fungible, so having access to only one would not significantly affect demand. Consider also that even a state of affairs like this that lasted only a few objective minutes for merely one emulation would amount to several subjective millenia of suffering. So it seems that, if our argument is valid, this is yet another way in which the order in which emerging technologies arrive heavily affects whether or not one should become a cryonics patient.
Given my idea of how things like this might happen, it might actually be extremely helpful to specify that you only be revived under very particular circumstances; the best example I have off of the top of my head is to elect to be revived only if it is possible to regenerate your physical body. Not because you're entirely avoiding being digitized (the nanobots have to know how to rebuild you!), but because the way to avoid being a victim of the demand for WBEs is to not become one until there are inviolable regulations in place protecting you from being surreptitiously copied.
Warning: people will be trying to be pessimistic here. Don't read this if you don't want to be reminded of scary outcomes.
Request: if you get an idea that you think might be too scary to post publicly even under the above warning, but you are willing to send it to me in a private message to aid in my personal decision-making, then please do :)
Motivation:
I like cryonics. According to my parents and grandmother, I started talking about building an AI to help with medical research to revive frozen dead people when I was about 10 years old, and my memory agrees. I began experimenting with freeing and unfreezing insects, and figured based on some positive results that it was physically possible to preserve life in a frozen state. Cool!
But now that I'm in middle of convincing some folks I know to sign up for cryonics, I want to do due-diligence on some of the vague, hard-to-verbalize aversions they have to doing it. This way, I can help them plan contingencies for / hedges against those aversions if possible, thereby making cryonics more viable for them, and maybe avoid accidentally persuading people do cryonics when it really isn't right for them (yes, I think that can actually happen).
There's already been a post on far negative outcomes, and another one on why cryonics maybe isn't worth it. But what I really want to do here is conduct an interactive survey to compute which disutilities should be taken most seriously when talking to a new person about cryonics, to avoid accidentally persuading them into making a wrong-for-them decision.
And for that, what I really want to ask is:
What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know of?
Examples:
(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me. She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.
(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.
I think on reflection I'd consider (1) to be around 10x and maybe 100x more likely than (2)*, but depending on your preferences, you might find (2) to be more than 100x worse than (1), enough to make it account for the biggest chunk of disutility that can be attributed to any particular simple story or story-feature where cryonics works.
[* I would have said (1) was definitely more than 100x more likely before so many of my female friends have, over the years, mentioned that they were subject to some pretty scary sexual violence at some point in their dating lives.]
(Note: There's a separate question of whether the outcome is positive enough to be worth the money, which I'd rather discuss in a different thread.)
How to participate:
Thanks for playing :)
PS I hope folks use these ideas to come up with ways to decrease the likelihood that cryonics leads to negative outcomes, and not to cause or experience premature fears that derail productive conversations. So, please don't share/post this in ways where you think it might have the latter effect, but rather, use it as a part of a sane and thorough evaluation of all the pros and cons that one should reasonably consider in deciding whether cryonics working is on-net a positive outcome.
ETA -- What not to post:
Some non-examples of what this survey should contain...