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Lumifer comments on Open thread for December 24-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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).