If I could just use it whenever I want without side effects I'd love to take a week or month off here and there, increasing usage as I grow older. If it's more of a one shot thing I'm not sure. Right now I think I can actively contribute to advancing the cutting edge but if in 10-20 years we're not seeing the kind of progress I hope for I'd consider long-term suspension so I can wake up in a world that has caught up to my ambitions.
A small practical thing.... if it were very cheap and safe, it could be used to skip rotten weather on a culture-wide basis.
So could moving to California.
Likely some people would make use of the lousy-weather days to get a competitive advantage on time-sensitive business. Think overnight delivery, or just rushing a product to market faster than the fair-weather competition.
It's kind of expensive to live in California, and would be more so if everyone tried to relocate to pleasant climates-- aside from that I've been in San Diego in the summer, and it's not what I'd call a good climate. I don't think you're even talking about all of California.
What I'm imagining is most people go into hibernation during the worst heat spells and ice storms and such, with a small proportion stay awake and do maintenance and get paid a premium for it.
This is probably good enough for science fiction, but I don't know whether it actually makes sense.
It would be tough to coordinate over areas large enough to have different weather. But it would be a fun story, especially taking into account the competitively advantaged but faster-aging "winter soldiers."
someone get on this. faster ager and fair weather person fall in love but can't leave their respective subcultures.
If it was just about me with human-like life time at stake, I'd not even hesitate to jump at it. In fact, I'd in that case I'd do much riskier and more costly things for much lesser rewards. To the point of desperation-induced stupidity probably.
However, I am bound by morals to stay here in hell and try to futilely help slightly increase the probability of good outcomes for others, because these abstract numbers say I don't matter.
(at least that's the narrative...)
Suspended Animation sounds to me like an attempt to escape the problems in the current world, in the hope that a future world might be better. To me, this seems irresponsible. Putting yourself in Suspended Animation seems to me like an attempt to escape responsibility for creating a better future. You're just leaving it to the people who don't take it. I want us to create a future world that is significantly better than our current one, but in order to do that, there have to be people that will actually suffer through our current world in order to make it happen, and I can't justify putting that responsibility on others if I'm not willing to accept it myself.
My greatest fear about long-term suspended animation is waking up in a dystopia, and spending the rest of my life wondering if I could have prevented this dystopian future in the counterfactual world where I did not enter suspended animation.
I think I wouldn't. I would strongly consider it- set up a trust fund, fast forward a hundred years to massive 'inherited' wealth plus superior tech level- but most of happiness has to do with social things, and I imagine that I have a much better shot of inventing cool things if I'm competing with my contemporaries rather than people 100 years from now. They'll probably be cleverer and more familiar with new tech.
If it were cheap and had no side effects, it could be used through evenings and days off work to minimize the cost-of-living overheard involved in earning money. An unemployed person might spend most of their time in hibernation with a mechanism set to wake them if they got a call regarding potential employment.
Costs? Side effects? Safety? Who will pay the rent? What will employer attitudes to you spending the last 5 years on ice be?
In re employer attitudes: imagine a society where a high proportion of people use suspension, but in differing amounts.
As a result, there/s a temporal cultural drift. An employer who is selling to people from an era would want to hire people familiar with that era.
This is definitely good enough for science fiction-- I'm not saying you'd get people who were pure examples of past eras, but there'd be people who were influenced by various eras to different degrees.
It would probably depend significantly on a number of factors, such as the cost, safety, number of adopters, the politics involved and how various friends and family members felt about it.
In general, I would say the uncertain risks of being an early adopter of an entirely new branch of technology for uncertain rewards are probably not for me at this time. But there are other times in my life where I would have pressed that button without a second thought. Certainly I'm not going to deride anyone else who wants to take the first steps towards guaranteeing a technologies usability for other people. I appreciate their efforts to help grant this field a chance.
It would also be a very useful field to have. Specifically if you have suspended animation, you have probably solved one of the key difficult problems of sending people to distant planets. So if it seemed like someone was making real progress in the field, I would probably be happy to help invest money even if I wasn't willing to take the risks of suspension myself.
I'd rather stick around on Earth unless I was terminally ill. I think I can do some good in the world, and I'd rather be doing it than sitting around suspended. Also, my life will worth living for the foreseeable future, so if I live until some form of immortality/life extension is developed I get more total years of worthwhile life if I don't de-animate.
This TED talk on suspended animation by Mark Roth captivated me when I first saw it last year, and I have been eagerly trying to follow developments on the subject ever since.
My question for the lesswrong crowd is, if suspended animation were available today in such a way that you could "skip" years, decades or even centuries in a de-animated state while not aging or aging only slightly, would you go for it? Would it be the rational thing to do, or would it be more rational to wait until you really needed it, for example, when you are nearing end of life or if you get diagnosed with an incurable, terminal illness?
What about friends and family? I can see people not wanting to use it because it would mean "waking up" in a world where the people they care about no longer exist. This is also an issue with cryonics, and I believe was the main reason Heinlein chose to be cremated rather than cryopreserved. However, the moral dilemma is more complicated, because with cryonics, it happens after you're dead, but with suspended animation, it must be done while you're still alive, so unless you get de-animated towards the end of your life, you've made a conscious decision to spend your remaining time on Earth in the future with other people rather than with those around you in the present. However, I could also see it being easier to sell people on than cryonics, if it worked as advertised, because it would be more of a sure thing, and might even be cheaper. I could even see it becoming so popular that a large percentage of the population opts out of their present life and the problems it presents them, hoping to "sleep" their way to a better future, causing problems of population imbalance.
I'm bringing this subject up here because I find the concept fascinating, and it doesn't seem to get nearly as much attention as cryonics, yet it will be much more disruptive if/when it ever arrives.