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Cryonics as Charity
Imagine you accept the main idea of cryonics, that if we freeze brains future technology is likely to be able to extract the encoded information and revive the person digitally. [1] While this currently costs about $120K/person, if we did it routinely to everyone it could probably get down below $1000/person. Which is interesting: the current cost of averting a death is around $1700, but someone who doesn't die of malaria is still going to die of old age, so you can't really say their death was "averted". While someone who is revived after being frozen wouldn't live eternally, they might get to experience thousands of years of subjective life. In terms of life-years, getting cryonics to be really cheap and paying for people to get it sounds like it beats GiveWell's top charities.
Aside from not agreeing that cryonics is likely to work, however, I don't think the value is actually all that high. A future world which would revive large numbers of people we freeze today would be massively different from the current world economically, but would still have constraints. There would be some number of digital people that could run simultaneously on whatever people-emulating hardware they have. Preserving additional 21st century minds would give future people the option to run revived people instead of new people, but I don't think it affects the overall number emulated.
[1] I don't think this is likely.
I also posted this on my blog.
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Comments (40)
I think it would be fairer to compare your $1000/thousandsoflife_years figure against other equally speculative back-of-the-envelope calculations, instead of against AMF. Generally more speculative causes (such as xrisk reduction) can produce better expected returns, but with a greater chance that we're somehow fooling ourselves or ignoring an unknown unknown.
Also, where did the $1000 estimate come from? Does it include the probability of success of cryonics and the probability that we survive for thousands of subjective years without destroying ourselves?
It was an estimate from someone at an optimial philanthropy meetup. I don't think it included any improbability discounts.
I expect this number to become unimaginably high in the foreseeable future, to the point that it is doubtful we'll be able to generate enough novel cognitive structures to make optimal use of it. The tradeoff would be more like 'bringing back dead people' v. 'running more parallel copies of current people.' I'd also caution against treating future society as a monolithic Entity with Values that makes Decisions - it's very probably still going to be capitalist. I expect the deciding factor regarding whether or not cryopatients are revived to be whether or not Alcor can pay for the revival while remaining solvent.
Also, I'm not at all certain about your value calculation there. Creating new people is much less valuable than preserving old ones. It would be wrong to round up and exterminate a billion people in order to ensure than one billion and one babies are born.
I agree, but I don't think that cuts to the point. The process of rounding up and killing a billion people, the sadness of people left behind, the skill loss, and the change of the age distribution, would all have large negative effects, and a billion and one babies would be a heck of a baby boom.
While practical issues mean that killing people is just about never the right thing to do, I don't agree that "creating new people is much less valuable than preserving old ones". See my response to Nisan.
This perspective looks deeply insane to me.
I would not kill a million humans to arrange for one billion babies to be born, even disregarding the practical considerations you mentioned, and, I suspect, neither would most other people. This perspective more or less requires anyone in a position of power to oppose birth control availability, and require mandatory breeding.
I would be about as happy with a human population of one billion as a hundred billion, not counting the number of people who'd have to die to get us down to a billion. I do not have strong preferences over the number of humans. The same does not go for the survival of the living.
It's extremely hard to get away from practical considerations here, and it tends to be hard for people to generalize ethics to things as far removed from practicality as killing a million adults to replace them with a billion babies.
It would? While mandatory breeding (via birth control denial or other measures) would make for a lot of people, their lives would be much worse. The reason a person in power opposing birth control and mandating breeding sounds horrible is the same as why I would oppose it: it would suck. No one wants to be forced to have kids.
I also care much more about the total number of people to ever exist (again, weighted by how good their lives are) than the total number to exist at once. Dramatically increasing the number of people alive now, even if you did it in a way that didn't affect average happiness, would probably just make us burn through our current stock of resources faster and not lead to more long-term total people.
Now this sounds deeply insane.
(Not as an insult! It just seems horribly scale insensitive.)
More people adopting (or wanting to adopt) cryonics should increase the investment in research, which increases the chance (and most likely the certainty level) of it working. Also consider that higher tech methods may be more expensive to implement. Storage costs would certainly drop, but if it turns out you need ten times the equipment to do ten times the damage reduction it may not drop the cost overall, but still end up with higher utility.
I've already written a couple articles on this, but I'll summarize them here. Basically, your assumptions seem overly generous:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5w1/the_cost_of_universal_cryonics/ - My optimistic estimate was ~$6K for universal cryonics
http://lesswrong.com/lw/6xk/years_saved_cryonics_vs_villagereach/ - If you assume cryonics has a 100% chance of working, it's actually ALREADY matching Village Reach on a cost-per-year-lived basis, and the quality of life is probably higher. But p(Cryonics) = 1 is a very shaky assumption.
I'm confused. This argument seems to assume that creating a new person and letting them live for a year has the same value as letting an already-existing person exist for a year. But this is absurd.
It is based on the idea that most of what matters is human-years-experienced, weighted by how good those years are. I don't think that's absurd.
We totally need a UFAI optimizing for this, just for the inevitable stage of countless factory-grown dopamine-fed, endorphin-drinking genetically-hyperhedonic infants being raised in superstimulating creches for a year before all of their nociceptors are rejiggered to create oxytocin cascade and they're loaded on a conveyor belt bound for the incinerator.
I'm not sure those count as very good human-years-experienced.
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.
Thanks for linking your thoughts on this matter.
That's not true. The investment funds will make a difference: by deferring consumption of resources throughout their lifetime, a cryonics patient is freeing up resources for continued compounding exponential economic growth until at least their revival.
Except that they are also deferring their labor contribution to the economy.
The free resources in the past didn't lead to compounding exponential growth; why would current free resources do so?
How did they earn the money they spent on cryonics, then?
Global growth has been exponential for a long time, even if the exponent is not as impressive as China's 8% annual growth for the last X years.
Where did the resources to put them into cryonics come from?
Consider the few data points in recorded human history: Has the doubling time of economic growth remained fairly constant, or varied widely? Is it more complicated to assume that growth in in general exponential, with the amount of free resources determining the exponent, or to assume that the size of the economy is proportional to the product amount of the most-limiting resource at the time (Labor, arable land, electric power) and the efficiency of use of that resource at that time? Either way, further explanations are required to discuss the variation of the data from the prediction.
From... what they earned while alive (or in rare cases, from others who choose to spend earnings on them). Where does any resources for anything come?
'Few'? Exponentials have been completely unambiguous for like 500 years and datapoints before then can be fit to an exponential.
I've never heard any economist say global growth and the Industrial Revolution was just this 'proportional' thing you are talking about. (eg.the Solow growth model without the 'technology' factor fits observed growth even worse than with the technology factor.) And I'm not sure what you're saying even differs from an exponential - what is an exponential but proportional growth, repeated every year?
So no, no further discussion is necessary. The point about cryonics patients helping long-term economic growth follows from the most basic points of economic theory and observed economic history.
500 years is 'few', yes. Especially considering that population~labor has been growing roughly exponentially for most of it.
With the advent of industrial equipment, labor is no longer as often the limiting factor.
Per capita income has also been going up! Massively! Why are you even bringing that up?
What does limiting factor mean here? Everything is a limiting factor in some sense, because supply creates its own demand.
Really? I don't see a large market for seawater. The supply is immense, so there should be a demand created for it, especially since it is used as a raw material for fresh water, a product which is in high demand in many areas.
The hypothesis that the market for labor will always clear is trivially falsified.
Real per capita income is simply total production divided by population. I doubt that real per-capita income has been increasing at anywhere near a constant power across history, rather than remaining roughly constant except during periods of technological development and/or social upheaval. In particular, pastoral societies have roughly constant total production (determined by the amount of arable land available and being used), and more labor does not produce more. Similarly for some other natural resources, such as properly managed fishing. More labor does not provide a larger sustainable catch.
Er... Maybe you should think a little harder.
Nations have fought throughout history and millions died for seawater - access to seawater, specifically, because there is so much seawater that you can use it as ultra-cheap fast transportation. (Russia alone fought several wars just to get one warmwater port anywhere, salt or fresh.) Besides that, seawater is sold commercially for fish and animal keeping; deep seawater is sold as a dietary supplement (popular in Japan); and much more importantly:
You even provided your own example! Desalinization plants are very expensive and produce expensive water... water that is feasible because seawater is free. Supply creates its own demand.
Oh for heaven's sake. Go look it up!
Why didn't anyone think to pump seawater into trucks and meet Russia's need for seawater? Because Russia didn't need seawater, it needed transportation links.
Desal plants typically don't have dirty water shipped to them, they are located where dirty water is. The limited resource consumed by their construction isn't seawater, it's location.
If sea levels rise, the added volume of seawater will not make desalination cheaper, just like a surplus of labor in the presence of labor price controls doesn't create a demand for labor at the controlled price.
I find a hundredfold cost decrease quite unlikely, but then, I'm not familiar at all with the costs involved or their potential to be reduced. If the idea of cryonics were accepted widely enough for it to be an acceptable alternative to more expensive treatment though, freezing old people with negative utility to society until a potential technological Singularity or merely the advent of mind uploading would not be far off - and that would be efficient even without cheap cryonics.