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aausch comments on You Only Live Twice - Less Wrong
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I used "un-frozen" loosely. I'm not that concerned with the actual technology, but with the other circumstances.
For example, I make the (I think fairly reasonable) assumption that whatever the process is going to be, it will likely be more expensive than, for example, growing a new human being from scratch. So, whoever will do the restoration will be looking to profit in some non-trivial way from it.
One thing that I am fairly certain my frozen head won't be able to do, is influence decisions around who is allowed to restore it, when, and at what tradeoffs.
You assume that your pattern will somehow be pulled out to somewhere - would you be ok if it's an irreversible process (say, your head has to be destroyed)? What if whatever you're expected to do in payment for being restored is something you'd rather not do? Etc...
To me, the expense of awakening the frozen seems to be evidence that the only futures who would revive them are ones acting from moral duty or historical curiosity, not ones that are looking to profit from them. If you're just looking for labor or profit, it seems there would be much cheaper alternatives at that level of technology.
I accept that there's obviously a long tail of possible futures, but it looks clear to me that the probability of being revived given a really positive Singularity is much greater than that of being revived otherwise (especially given my estimate that lack of a positive Singularity implies high odds of total extinction of humanity and human values). My priors could be way off and cryonics would still be a good bet on balance.
I don't trust my ability to predict what kind of profit there is to be made in reviving corpsicles. Whether it's a simple thank you, or 30 years dedicated to writing history, or freeing up of electricity for some other uses, or experimenting with un-freezing techniques before trying them on more important people - I don't think it really matters.
There are some obvious, and some non-obvious, ways to hedge this bet, though, and I'm surprised at how little discussion and effort has gone into them. The cost of freezing, at the minimum, might contain funds to pay for the unfreezing, too....