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blacktrance comments on Open thread for December 24-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The reason I'm not optimistic about cryonics is because I don't think it's likely that I'd be revived in the future, even if the technology would work perfectly if used properly. Imagine modern-day explorers find 5000 people cryogenically frozen in a cave 1000 years ago, and we can revive any number of them. How many would be revived? I doubt even half of them would be - because, if revived, what would they do? What would 5000 people from around 1000 AD do in modern times? And the faster pace of social and technological change compounds the problem. So if someone had the opportunity to revive me in 500-1000 years, I don't think they would.
I expect this is a common argument against cryonics. Is there a counterargument, and if so, what is it?
cryonics organizations are all designed to provide for revival when it becomes possible. This is like asking "Why would your life insurance pay out after you're dead?"
Because if they don't, someone (the beneficiary of your policy) has an incentive to take them to court. Who has that incentive in the case of cryonics?
All the people currently signed up for cryonics but not dead.
Alcor at least also requires boardmembers to have loved ones currently in suspension so there's another incentive.
Let's suppose it's 50 years in the future and you're signed up for cryonics with, say, Alcor. How confident are you that you'd know if Alcor had quietly disposed of some of their patients from 50 years ago?
If your answer, like mine, is "not very", then how strong an incentive do you think the fear of lawsuits from other signed-up people is, against any temptation to dispose of old patients to increase their profits?
(I am not suggesting that they do, or should do, that. Only that that particular incentive probably doesn't change their behaviour much.)
That would be a good reason to be very public about having signed up with Alcor.
Unfortunately, being frozen has such strong connotations of weirdness that it probably doesn't make sense for Alcor to be public about its whole client list.
An interesting question -- when are cryopreserved people supposed to be revived? Obviously when it becomes possible, but are there any other criteria? Let's say we learned how to unfreeze people but there's no effective immortality in sight (through uploading or biohacking or anything else) -- should they be revived at this point?
That question is relevant here because at the point where effective immortality is possible no one has any reason to sign up for cryonics. Everyone has already uploaded/ascended/whatever, so why would they revive a bunch of frozen primitives?
I think it's unlikely that we'll have the technology to revive cryopreserved people without also having at least a significant amount of life extension technology. Many of the same kids of human body repair you would need to do to revive a frozen person would be helpful in lengthening lifespan.
If we invent immortality before we invent unsuspension then hopefully the people running the cryo foundation become immortal and continue to care enough to revive their friends and relatives.
I don't think this is realistic. About the only two plausible ways I can think of reviving a cryonics patient are brain uploading and some of the more optimistic projections for nanotechnology, either of which should be sufficient for effective immortality. If there is another proposed method of revival which would not facilitate effective immortality, I am not aware of it.
That is true for cryonics as it currently exists. However, our ability to freeze people without damaging them is improving. Perhaps we will be able to freeze and revive people fairly easily before we can make them immortal or revive people who were frozen before it could be done well.
This topic has come up many times before. It's a choice between reviving people, letting them stay in stasis for future revival, or destroying them. Either of the two first options are fine with me as long as I'm revived at some point. And if future morality is such that it is deemed ok to just kill someone rather than keep them in stasis, then that's not a world I want to live in, so I'd rather not be revived.
For me cryonics isn't about living forever. It's about living better.
A more important concern, for me at least, is revival by a malevolent civilization/AI. My prototypical example of a dystopia is the galactic empire from Warhammer 40,000. I would not want to be revived for use as cannon fodder for the empire's troops (ok, I know the chances of there being a totalitarian galaxy-spanning empire in the future are not very high, but you get the point).
They would be adults, then. Small children from 1000 AD could just learn what's going on in modern times and start doing whatever everyone else is doing.
So what exactly is keeping the adults back here? And would it still be a thing in a world where you can bring frozen human brains back to life?
They'd all get hired to have their brains picked by historians. I'd love to talk to them too, but I bet it'd be too expensive...