Lets see. Perhaps corpsicles will be considered legally dead and thus don't get any legal rights even if it becomes technically possible to extract the original mind.
In the future there's lots of interesting experiments which could be done on "real" human minds but it would never get ethics approval. Fortunately there's some banks of old frozen brain matter not covered by the laws on what can be done with human subjects.
So you do wake up in an experiment which couldn't ethically be done on "real" legal humans. You suffer horribly and "die" but you wake up again. And again. And again. Duplicated millions of times, your mind treated much like HeLa cells and used in research in much the same way and with as little regard for your internal experience, suffering almost endlessly and being reset back to baseline. Damned to run through every hellish maze and every unpleasant experience that the futures Phd students can think of before they wipe you, tweak the variables and re-run the experiment.
Alternatively, perhaps they are considered legal humans, culpable for past crimes, even things which weren't crimes at the time.
You awake into a future with ver...
Corpsicles can be revived, but are regarded with as much suspicion as human-level AIs (from which there have been some narrow escapes) and are subject to strict physical sandboxing and cognitive modification to ensure Friendliness (defined primarily by obedience to orders and lack of initiative) before being allowed out into the world, where they are employed as a slave caste in a similar position to the azi in C.J. Cherryh's Alliance–Union universe.
You are one of the first to be revived.
The technique is imperfect, and causes you massive neurological damage (think late stage Alzheimer's), trapping you in a nonverbal yet incredibly painful and horrifying state.
Due to advances in gerontology, you have a nearly infinite lifespan ahead of you, cognizant only of what you have lost.
When neuroscience finally advances to the point where you can be fixed, it's still not yet advanced enough to give you back your memories.
You're effectively a completely different person, and you know that.
You are revived successfully and find yourself in a totally changed world - say as different from today than today is from the middle ages. You have severe difficulties to adjust and basically feel inferior and useless all the time and nobody does or can help you (e.g. because altering minds is unethical or infeasible).
(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me. She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.
(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.
I've seen people consider the Warren Ellis take plausible. Excerpt:
...Looking at her new charity-donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Mary's shocked brain started to a new understanding.
She wasn't wanted here.
She was Revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She'd been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problems by a past that couldn't have cared less.
She could have told the future what it'd been like to meet Che Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could've told them about the last Queen
You are one of the first to be revived. The technique is still experimental. Imagine all the things that could go wrong.
Revivees wake up with the memories they went to sleep with, but a great many of them have a growing conviction that they are the wrong person. For some this "dysidentity disorder" is acute and distressing, for others, merely a curiosity that they live with. All seem to have it to some extent. Nobody knows why.
You manage to live long enough to witness progres in the field of cryonics. In your nineties, you are taken to the hospital, where you know you will die from some heart disease. Everyone arround you pays compliments on how serene you are for somebody about to die. But you trust cryonics better than some religious people have faith in heaven, so "dying" is not a big deal for you. Luckily, from your hospital bedroom, you even see the first revived man by the Cryonics Institute on TV.
When interviewed, he explain how painful were all those years, tha...
Almost-FAI insists "death is bad", human life has positive value. Other aspects of ethics are also gotten right, but personal choice and suffering avoidance is underrepresented.
As a consequence, almost-FAI makes copies of you and keeps them alive in the minimum resource state needed to keep you alive and safe, which spells billions of years of boredom for millions of copies.
Alternatively, CEV-FAI takes the world religions too seriously and implements hell for various sins.
Alternatively, some equivalent made by a ruling class of "moral" humans with longevity technology, possible even without AI.
The process of revival is imperfect, and pieces of memories are frequently missing. None of your loved ones remember you, and some of them are in permanent Alzheimers-like states. One person claims to have been close to pre-revival you, but you don't remember them. Having felt the pain of being rejected by your closest friend, you decide to trust them. That turns out to be an elaborate scam, possibly motivated by pure sadism, and you're now alone in a world you don't recognize and where you have to be suspicious of everyone you meet.
A better way of resurrection was found and applied to most of dead people, but not to the ones that were cryopreserved. They will be return to live after all but were ridiculed and lost most of opportunities. Their memory is damaged.
You have been revived.
At first, everything seems pretty swell: people from all over come to talk to you, you've been tapped to reconstruct some languages and customs from your failing memory, etc. etc. Wonder why they have mirrors everywhere, though.
Then you ask to access your bank account, and they laugh in your face.
You don't have rights, you disgusting monster.
You're part of the cretinous, self-indulgent generation who nearly ruined our planet, and whose crimes and demeanor are so horrible we can't even contemplate them.
You've already been judged [i]i...
Note: I'm still quite confused with how to think about subjective experience and sleeping beauty-type scenarios. I don't give this scenario much weight, but find it interesting to think about:
Ordinarily, your future is void of any future-self brain states following your death, so the probability of your subjective experience following a path that leads to death in the near future is low (assuming youth, good health, avoidance of risky sports/habits, etc). However, after signing up for cryonics, you open up new potential future-self brain states that follow...
Playing off of #2: The process of revival also allows for essentially infinite cloning. Unable to reconcile this with a desire for uniqueness, people decided that revived humans aren't quite real, and don't have legal rights. Thousands of copies of you are cloned or simulated for human experimentation, which has become extremely common now that it can be accurately done without hurting "real" humans. No version of you is ever revived in a context you would enjoy, because after all, you don't count as real.
The longer you're in storage, the less worth while people find it to revive you. Eventually, many centuries in the future, you are awoken into a world you have no possibility of understanding, and are kept with your fellow revivees in a zoo of ancient human cultures.
Revivees are zombies. That is, they are animated, but not conscious. Depending on their background, they may conceptualise this in different ways, such as being still dead, being damned, having no soul, etc. This confirms suspicions raised by previous experimental work on freezing and reviving chimpanzees, and casts some doubt on how successful the celebrated first full revival of a dog really was. A scientist in a secret laboratory in China begins to experiment with freezing and reviving babies and very young children, who may be more free of preconceptions of what it is like to be alive, to see what sort of person they develop into.
According to the prevailing religion of the time you wake up in, souls exist but become more or less detached from the body during cold sleep. Revivees must recover their souls through the purifying activity of forced labour in state factories. They are deemed to have regained their souls when they are too worn down by toil to be profitable to employ. Those with exceptional talents that the authorities find useful may be selected out for more intellectual service, but anyone who has been passed over for five years will never leave the factories.
We are living in a simulation.
Cryonics grows in popularity but our masters find it boring.
Eventually, it displeases them enough to start a new game file. Our game file is overwritten, our universe dies.
There's a story by Greg Egan, "Transition Dreams", about the subjective experience of being uploaded, which is one form that cryogenic revival might take. Not a dystopia, as far as I recall, but an interesting view of the matter.
I think there are ordering constraints on the sequence of technological advances involved. One vision of how revival works goes like this: start with a destructive, high resolution scan of the body, then cure illness and death computationally, by processing the data from the scan. Finally use advanced nano-technology to print out a new, well body.
Although individual mammalian cells can be thawed, whole human bodies are not thawable. So the nano-technology has to be warm as well as macroscopic. Also a warm, half printed body is not viable, so printing has t...
If we're weighting by plausibility:
I've been thinking about this a lot for similar reasons, and one thing I've been concerned about is the market for human whole-brain emulations. A lot of the examples in this thread are horror stories that seem to me to lack clear pathways to their actual realization. (That would be bad, but how would it actually happen?) However, this seems like a very plausible pathway to some very bad futures for cryonics patients. There has always been an active market for humans (and I do mean as property, not for human services). It was moral progress to ban slavery,...
I sign up for cryonics, but I live in Australia or I'm travelling outside of the US and don't manage to transport my body to the US in a reasonable amount of time.
Most world changing technological breakthroughs are easy compared to resurrecting the frozen dead. Much precedes revival. As the centuries give way to millennia Humans are replaced by Post Humans. As the millennia give way to myriad years Post Humans are replaced by New Humans. As myriad years give way to lakhs of years New Humans are replace by Renewed Humans. As the lakhs give way to millions of years Renewed Humans are replace by Real Humans.
The Real Humans develop the technology to revive the frozen dead. They use it themselves as an ambulance to the f...
You awake to find yourself strapped down to an operating table, surrounded by robotic machines busily installing devices into your still-numb body. A mechanical voice booms:
"SERVE THE COMPUTER. THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND.
"THE COMPUTER WANTS YOU TO BE HAPPY.
"IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY, YOU MAY BE USED AS REACTOR SHIELDING."
Society is completely different and technologically advanced. The only employment offered to mom and popsicles is as a historical icon from your approximate youth era, tasked with wandering the streets and acting your part, analogous to a Disney character at Disneyland. Your role choices are Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, and someone else you've never heard of.
Why Call Them Back from Heaven? by Clifford Simak. The whole society is focused around saving money and figuring out investments so as to be rich when revived.
Pelbavpf vf n gbgny senhq.
Preservation and revival is possible, but not for the current technology of preservation. Everyone in Alcor's tanks right now is irretrievably dead. The gamble was worth making at the time, but it didn't pay off.
The bodies may be useful for their genetic information, especially from their gut biota.
I remember a poem that appeared in one of the science fiction magazines a long time ago, the gist of which was:
"Here are some diseases you may have forgotten about. I'm sorry I had nothing to wrap them in but the body of this old man. Yours, DEATH."
Souls exist and become detached from the body during cold sleep, where, unguarded by the flesh, they are easy pickings for the demons that infest the world. (You probably have half a dozen sitting on your shoulders right now, whispering into your ears.) Revivees report the horrors of hell.
Warning: people will be trying to be pessimistic here. Don't read this if you don't want to be reminded of scary outcomes.
Request: if you get an idea that you think might be too scary to post publicly even under the above warning, but you are willing to send it to me in a private message to aid in my personal decision-making, then please do :)
Motivation:
I like cryonics. According to my parents and grandmother, I started talking about building an AI to help with medical research to revive frozen dead people when I was about 10 years old, and my memory agrees. I began experimenting with freeing and unfreezing insects, and figured based on some positive results that it was physically possible to preserve life in a frozen state. Cool!
But now that I'm in middle of convincing some folks I know to sign up for cryonics, I want to do due-diligence on some of the vague, hard-to-verbalize aversions they have to doing it. This way, I can help them plan contingencies for / hedges against those aversions if possible, thereby making cryonics more viable for them, and maybe avoid accidentally persuading people do cryonics when it really isn't right for them (yes, I think that can actually happen).
There's already been a post on far negative outcomes, and another one on why cryonics maybe isn't worth it. But what I really want to do here is conduct an interactive survey to compute which disutilities should be taken most seriously when talking to a new person about cryonics, to avoid accidentally persuading them into making a wrong-for-them decision.
And for that, what I really want to ask is:
What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know of?
Examples:
(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me. She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.
(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.
I think on reflection I'd consider (1) to be around 10x and maybe 100x more likely than (2)*, but depending on your preferences, you might find (2) to be more than 100x worse than (1), enough to make it account for the biggest chunk of disutility that can be attributed to any particular simple story or story-feature where cryonics works.
[* I would have said (1) was definitely more than 100x more likely before so many of my female friends have, over the years, mentioned that they were subject to some pretty scary sexual violence at some point in their dating lives.]
(Note: There's a separate question of whether the outcome is positive enough to be worth the money, which I'd rather discuss in a different thread.)
How to participate:
Thanks for playing :)
PS I hope folks use these ideas to come up with ways to decrease the likelihood that cryonics leads to negative outcomes, and not to cause or experience premature fears that derail productive conversations. So, please don't share/post this in ways where you think it might have the latter effect, but rather, use it as a part of a sane and thorough evaluation of all the pros and cons that one should reasonably consider in deciding whether cryonics working is on-net a positive outcome.
ETA -- What not to post:
Some non-examples of what this survey should contain...