It is important to realize that the moment you sign up for cryonics and the advancements made thus far are not the ones that you are likely to be subject to. While current practices may well fail to preserve usable identity-related information (regardless of experts opinions on whether or not this is happening (if it were known now, we could know it)), advancements and research continue to be made. It is not in your best interests to be preserved as soon as possible, but it is in your best interests to sign up as soon as possible, to ensure eventual preservation. Too often I see people basing their now-decisions on the now-technology, rather than the now-measured rate of advancement of the technology. The condition of, "If I'm going to be dieing soon," is simply not likely enough that most of us should be implicitly considering it as a premise.
Can you get the cryo procedure itself at a lower rate by signing up now? Or is it just a matter of insurance premiums? (if the latter, it might be better to cut out the middleman and do the low-risk-investing directly?) .
In June 2012, Robin Hanson wrote a post promoting plastination as a superior to cryopreservation as an approach to preserving people for later uploading. His post included a paragraph which said:
This left me with the impression that the chances of the average cryopreserved person today of being later revived aren't great, even when you conditionalize on no existential catastrophe. More recently, I did a systematic read-through of the sequences for the first time (about a month 1/2 ago), and Eliezer's post You Only Live Twice convinced me to finally sign up for cryonics for three reasons:
I don't find that terribly encouraging. So now I'm back to being pessimistic about current cryopreservation techniques (though I'm still signing up for cryonics because the cost is low enough even given my current estimate of my chances). But I'd very much be curious to know if anyone knows what, say, Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg think about the issue. Anyone?
Edit: I'm aware of estimates given by LessWrong folks in the census of the chances of revival, but I don't know how much of that is people taking things like existential risk into account. There are lots of different ways you could arrive at a ~10% chance of revival overall:
is one way. But:
is a very similar conclusion from very different premises. Gwern has more on this sort of reasoning in Plastination versus cryonics, but I don't know who most of the people he links to are so I'm not sure whether to trust them. He does link to a breakdown of probabilities by Robin, but I don't fully understand the way Robin is breaking the issue down.