As more hackers start to die, when do we finally do something about it?
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When you've experienced a few minor illnesses and a bit of short-lived pain, such as a broken limb or two, living forever still sounds great.
I had a (thankfully temporary) condition that resulted in chronic pain for about a year. It wasn't terrible pain, but pain that never goes away wears you down in a way that horrible, but short-lived, pain simply doesn't. After a while you just want it to stop. Before this period in my life I was of the opinion that immortality was worth almost anything. Now I believe that quality of life is just as important, if not more so. I would not want to live forever if it involved even a small amount of chronic pain. I used to think a little pain would be a small price to pay. That was ignorance.
Jobs and Ritchie both died from diseases that probably gave them a good deal of chronic pain over the last years of their lives. I can completely understand why extending their lives was not desirable to them.
I think its presumed that life extension would also come with improved health. What kills you is decline due to chronic conditions. Target that and stop the declined and you gain both long-life, and healthy life.
1. Preventing / curing all causes of pain. 2. Changing how the body responds to pain.
I think problem number 2 is easier to solve. The human body is a biological machine and I hink we will find better ways of handling pain than today. An example could be an implant in the brain that simply blocks the impulses.
But that's just a thought experiment. No cryonicist expects to be revived in anything less than fully regenerated (or uploaded) condition. Reanimating into a painful and incurable half-life is unlikely, as you probably could not revive someone to begin with if you didn't have the ability to prevent that.
Steve Jobs:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs is the single worst example that the OP could've picked as a candidate for cryopreservation, as it goes against everything he (and I) believes in.
Keep in mind that after you suffer your serious accident/illness, you won't have the time/money/energy to sign up for cryonics, and you'll have more trouble convincing your next of kin to support you. And you probably won't be able to get any life insurance to pay for it, obviously.
Or you think it's dumb and fruitless and a waste of money. We don't have any way of predicting the expected value of cryopreservation. It could be that after you get frozen, an earthquake/tsunami takes out the power and you thaw. Or the company goes under. Or you get abandoned. Or any number of other things.
How likely are you to be unfrozen/cured/revived? No one can say for sure, but it's probably pretty unlikely. On the other hand, what's the likelihood that your estate can do something useful with an extra $25k? That's pretty likely.
And no, you can't put a probability on those events which might make cryonics fail, because you don't know how long it will be before we discover a way to revive and restore those that have been frozen. It might happen tomorrow (likely not), or it might never happen. On a long enough timeline, the probability of failure approaches 1.
You also can't really assign a probability that you will personally be unfrozen. Sure, you pay $50/mo to be maintained, but that's wholly different from the $100k it might cost to thaw you.
There are so many ways cryonics could fail you, and really only one way they could succeed.
If you can get the probability of failure in any given year low enough, the half-life of the organization could be brought up to thousands of years. You can also set up back-up organizations that are obligated to take over if one of them fails. It's a matter of diversification.
I disagree with your assertion that you can get the company to live thousands of years. How many human organizations have lasted that long? Even the Catholic church has only been around for 2k (so they claim at least) and I can't think of anything else that approaches that longevity, not even nations. And there are way too many cases for potential failure to calculate real probabilities so arguing about getting them low enough is moot.
We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.
Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free. Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.
> We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.
I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure. The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.
> Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything. And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.
Yes it costs more money and it has to be done in advance.
> Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.
You could put it in the bylaws that they cannot merge into a conglomerate, or mandate that they split every so often.
> I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure.
Sure those are a constant risk. The solution is to put money and resources towards reducing the risks, starting with the worst ones and/or the cheapest to fix. This likely has enormous positive externalities for the population as a whole.
> The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.
Are you sure? Education is an important element of what sustains civilization.
> Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything.
They are now when they aren't frozen yet.
> And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.
They do if they a) expect to be frozen themselves, b) see the patients as fellow humans, or c) see the patients as priceless historical artifacts. But yes they are also motivated by whatever keeps getting them their paychecks -- obviously it is best to stack things so that the paychecks are dependent on things that are desirable for the patients.
This is a whole lot of ifs. If you could institute enough failovers (how many is enough, when we don't know the average lifespan of a cryo-company?), and if you could stop them from merging, and if you could avoid natural disasters, and if, if, if. There are so many ifs here it's ridiculous, especially given that you haven't provided any hows. This is just hand-waving. Yes, if you could solve all the problems, then there would be no problems. How, though?
> Are you sure? Education is an important element of what sustains civilization.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that an educated population has little or nothing to do with natural disasters, or company failures, or even war.
> They are now when they aren't frozen yet.
Um, okay. This doesn't have much to do with the viability of cryonics. Let's assume that all the cryonists campaign for peace and are then frozen. So now they're in a peaceful world with no way to thaw them and no change in the overall risks except perhaps with regards to war.
I disagree that company failures or war are unrelated to education levels (or quality). A well educated populace should be more resistant to and capable of avoiding war, and more capable of solving and preventing financial problems. One specific thing for cryonics trusts to do is offer scholarships to those pursuing peace and financial stability as educational specialties.
Natural disasters can be avoided to some degree by careful selection of location. Alcor is based in Arizona partly because of the lack of earthquakes. Hurricanes and tornadoes be protected against by using a monolithic dome. LN2 shortages can be protected against by having a large bulk storage tank on site, and using efficient insulation.
That said, the most desirable solution (because it addresses all the different sources of risk simultaneously) is to accelerate the development of revival technology to whatever degree is possible. Maintaining high education levels is critical to this, as is spending money on brain and body repair research. This produces a very large positive externality.
The strategy that works best is to make sure that multiple things have to go wrong in order for a critical failure at each critical point. That is how disasters are prevented in e.g. nuclear facilities. It's expensive and painstaking, but it is a case where throwing money and competent engineers at the problem actually works.
Your argument for cryonics having a low probability of working apparently assumes no one has done or will have done this, despite the obvious fact that they have an extremely strong interest in so doing. And you accuse accuse me of hand-waving?
You're crazy to think that a well-educated populace will avoid war. Americans are well-educated and we've been involved in wars nearly non-stop since we were founded. As for companies failing, the last several years have shown us that educated people will happily destroy companies for personal gain (not that we didn't already know this).
Natural disasters can be made less probable by choosing an appropriate location, not avoided entirely. An asteroid can hit Arizona as easily as New York. And earthquakes can basically strike anywhere. They're simply more likely in certain areas.
My argument for cryonics' low probability is based on the fact that so many things can go wrong over such a long time frame (we don't engineer nuclear facilities to last for thousands of years). The fact that some people have pursued cryonics is in no way proof or even evidence of it's feasibility. How many billions of people pursue religion for the same reasons? The desire for self-preservation often results in irrational behaviors.
This is a good point, but it bears stressing that the bulk of the trust fund is there for reanimation and as protection against economic instability. Only a very tiny fraction gets used for ongoing expenses, at least in the current Alcor situation.
Compound interest? Depends on how the trust is managed. Once you're dead, you're obviously not going to be able to influence that. It also depends on the economy, and we've seen some pretty long runs lately with no cumulative gains.
Overfunding? That doesn't even make sense. We're talking about there no being enough funds, and you pipe in with "what if there's too much!".
External funding? What makes you think someone in the future is going to drop a million to reanimate your head?
Future advances? Sure, but it seems pretty farfetched to say that future advances are going to make body reconstruction affordable. I mean, how long have we been waiting for affordable flying cars?
Downvoter: I raise you a Russell's Teapot.
You do not get points for reductio ad absurdum arguments.
The probability that, in the unlikely case your dead frozen head isn't thrown away at some point in time, you can be revived from it is so extraordinarily remote that I don't see the point.
It is way more likely that at some point technology will allow to simulate famous personalities from their writings, photos, etc than from a frozen piece of meat.
When you're dead, you're dead. Get over it, most people who have been are dead, too. And like the saying goes, cemeteries are full of indispensable men.
By paying $25k to be frozen, you also get a nonzero chance that you'll be revived and live through thousands of years of torture.
How is getting your head frozen investing in preventing such a world? If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.
It isn't, directly. It is an investment in something else which makes that a more important issue to an individual. That affects the probability of the individual taking actions that favor the given outcome. The main purpose of getting your head frozen is saving the individual's life directly, but it does have this positive externality.
> If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.
How does passively letting yourself die increase your incentive to plan for a better world in the distant future?
No, it doesn't. This is all feel-good silliness. You've said stuff like this in numerous replies, but you've given no reason for anyone to believe that cryonics has any positive impact. A 25K donation for Malaria treatment would probably do a lot more. That provides concrete benefits, rather than intangible hopes that cryonists will somehow work toward a better tomorrow.
> How does passively letting yourself die increase your incentive to plan for a better world in the distant future?
How does spending money on snake oil do more for the world than spending that same money on solving real problems?
For your argument to make any sense, we have to accept that no one cares about the state or fate of the world after their own deaths, which is absurdly cynical.
People who care about the state of the world after their deaths are not in the same position as those who actually expect to experience it. They are not as likely to care as much or to employ rational means to that end, because their concern is a more altruistic and abstract one, the sort of emotion which evolves for signaling/tribal purposes rather than personal survival. Entirely different neural machinery is employed when evaluating the problem differently.
I don't know how you reached the conclusion that my argument relies on no one caring about the future in spite of death. My argument is that you can increase your rational, self-interested incentives to care about the future by planning to be cryopreserved.
People who care about the state of the world after their deaths are more likely to donate. How much have charities benefited from posthumous donations? A cryonist who does not expect to "die" has no incentive to donate in their will. At least religions say "you can't take it with you". Cryonics says "sure you can; put it in the bank".
You're also making a false connection between the desire for self-preservation and rational behavior. People do all kinds of stupid crap because they think it will keep them alive. They go to faith healers, they take dangerous or useless substances, they engage in pointless rituals, etc. I would say "pursuing cryonics" belongs to that list.
You should probably stop using the terms "dead" and "frozen" in this context. Cryopreservation seeks to avoid ice crystal formation, and cryonics seeks to avoid death. So it has the effect of affirming the consequent.
The fact that a large portion of cryonics funding will eventually go towards this kind of research and thus help non-cryonics patients who have brain injuries is a rather significant spillover benefit.
And FWIW, Alcor and Cryonics Institute don't require power for storage; they require deliveries of liquid nitrogen. I don't think either facility has much earthquake/tsunami risk, either.
[1] Personally, I would want to be > 99% sure about this before completely giving up on cryonics.
On what basis do you claim there's a good chance I'm overconfident about cryonics' non-utility? I could say your overconfident in its utility and be standing on ground at leas as firm a you.
There's also a chance that you never get reanimated, or that you're reanimated by future humans who torture you to see how ancient humans react to stimulus, or any number of other possibilities that make cryonics unattractive.
I'm blaming autocorrect for these...
That same logic can be used to justify spending inordinate resources on any sort of snake oil. Why should cryonics be special?
Perhaps the logic is:
* If something is agreed to have a chance of extending my life for thousands of years by more than 5% of people whose thinking I respect and
* it costs less than 200k and
* there are no obvious people who are profiting from this then
* I want to be >99% sure about it not being viable before giving up on it.
If something is agreed to have a chance of extending my life for thousands of years by more than 5% of people whose thinking I respect and
Check
it costs less than 200k and
Check
there are no obvious people who are profiting from this then
Check
This is at least as true for religion (which you can practice for free) as it is for cryonics (which is a business venture).
I want to be >99% sure about it not being viable before giving up on it.
In what way can you be >99% sure that religion is not viable? What logic allows you to believe in cryonics but not religion, given that each have basically the same scientific underpinnings (which is to say, none at all).
EDIT: Unless you meant that the logic you described was not yours, but just mmaro's, in which case fair enough.
But regardless, there is one truth we all have to face: We will one day die. Even should you beat the biological death, should you somehow survive the backlash of fellow humans who reject your bid for immortality, you will still fail. Because one day the Universe will either run out of energy or contract back upon itself, at which point you will either starve or be crushed. You have a few billion years to find an answer for that.
We already suffer from over-population and pollution. Death is a key piece of the demographic shift, and just about every other anthropological process related to the change and evolution of culture and society.
Living longer would not increase our society's capability or capacity, it would almost assuredly decrease it, not to mention life would be exceptionally crowded, everywhere.
I think it would improve our capacity. Look at how much investment is put into someone before they can productively give back to the economy - kids take years of being raised, teacher's time, plus years of experience before they start paying their own way.
I think life extension would spread that capital cost out over a much longer productive life - right now say years 1-20 you are a resource drain, and the same for years 65-90. So you are producing stuff for society just half of your life (yet, this is enough for a surplus - the quality of goods output today in the world is continuously increasing) If we double lifespan it would double the productive years, so each life would be MUCH more productive.
That's not even including the fact that the second (doubled) productive section could take advantage of the first section's experience. So if we doubled each individual's productive lifetime, (by increasing total lifespan by just 50%) it would most likely more than double their total output.
Imagine how valuable someone who had 40 years of experience, plus a 20 year old's fast mind would be?
[note that by productivity I mean the amount of human / natural resources a person takes up; kids take up parents & teacher's time, older people take up highly trained doctor's time. People who are "productive" are generating more valuable services than they're taking up. So, people spending longer within that middle section would make them even more of a gain for the world]
Death is final. Other things we can deal with.
But, as Carl Sagan said: "It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses."
It is true that turtles can live for almost 200 years and some plants can live for thousands of years. If we are essentially, biochemically the same, we could in theory overcome our biochemical "bugs" to achieve negligible senescence. So, we'd live forever.
Unfortunately, that's a hard problem because we didn't design the system -- unlike computers and programing languages -- and we're trying to reverse engineer an insanely complex system created by the massively parallel process of natural selection acting on random mutation. And we're hampered by things like IACUC.
Computational capacity may double every 2 years, but a mouse still has a generation time of 3 months, just like it did a million years ago. That's why biomedical progress (frustratingly) doesn't progress at Moore's Law, and you can't just throw money or engineering talent at the problem.
So yeah, focus on "death" as a biochemical problem, but "focusing on death" won't solve the problem at the same pace as focusing your engineering talent on a human engineering problem. The natural sciences are much more stochastic, and there's no clear path to immortality.
So why create a synthetic if you can convert an organic? Probably more likely than us creating a 'real' A.I. anyway.
(Our replicators have, but they're responsible for this mess in the first place)
At least with getting people into space, the basic techniques (launch rocket, orbit earth) and constraints were figured out. Devil was in the endless details.
Humans still barely understand how aging works, much less how to theoretically stop it. Sure there's hypotheses here and there, but no unified description or strategy to stop the process.
nonetheless I'm pretty optimistic about the possibilities of genetic reengineering. a lot of that research is really constrained by those ancient (aristotelean) laws concerning stem cell research.
I bet once indefinite life extension becomes feasible, something along these lines will happen:
Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them.
(from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow)
Space travel would alleviate that restriction.
Plus, industrialized nations lose population (birth rate < death rate). So industrializing the whole world as quickly as possible is probably a good way to stabilize the total global population.
What do you (since this is a self post) think we as society should do about it?
* Better social networking for cryonics participants.
* More persuasive essays on the topic.
* New blood in the movement.
* Stronger associations to stronger movements.
* Different or more aggressive marketing/promotion tactics.
* Prizes similar to the X-Prize for demonstrating reversible cryopreservation on a small scale (e.g. organs)
* (Maybe unrealistic?) Government funding for cryobiology, specifically as pertains to brain preservation, and secondarily as pertains to whole organisms.
One major thing I'm noticing is that cryonics frequently seems to be seen as a low-status thing, despite being popularly associated with wealthy billionaires. There seems to be a paleo-humanistic (as I call it) tendency to rationalize and even glorify death as part of the grand cycle of life, and cryonics seems to be directly set against that. This may be why so many of the old sci-fi greats (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc.) opted out. AFACT most living sci-fi and great humanistic writers of the aging generation (Terry Pratchett, David Brin, and so forth) are not signed up nor particularly supportive. I'm not sure how to change this narrative but I strongly feel there is a problem with it.
Another big problem I see is that cryonics tends to be popularly associated with selfishness -- yet it is compatible with altruism, and in fact has exceptional potential to save billions of lives if pursued aggressively (and if it works). Technically, it seems like one need not be concerned with one's own survival at all to be in favor of cryopreserving the world (particularly when economies of scale are factored in).
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajn1LpstEUO_dE0...
1) Access failure: an external event prevents the initiation of your cryo-preservation, such as your relatives and/or your hospital insisting on your death taking place as scheduled, or other things preventing you from having access to the facilities needed. - These dangers are substantial. I'd wager that the majority of society is against even simple life extension, and thus even more opposed to cryo. There is also no way to mitigate this risk, since people tend not to die in circumstances under their direct control. Your best bet is probably to convince a close family member to act on your behalf when the time comes, because family has a lot of authority with... you know, the authorities.
2) Persistence failure: things that cause your preserved brain to be destroyed, such as war, system outages, economic trouble, or global catastrophes (including new laws or a radical culture shift). - The probability of just one of these occurring is pretty high, but there is simply no way to accurately estimate this risk. However, the probability of these events leading to your demise is lowered if more people adopt cryo preservation.
3) Preservation/restauration failure: some technical reason prevents your pattern from being restored into a working copy. These include excessive tissue damage before or during storage, or technical problems in reconstructing your brain back into working order. - Compared to the other risks, this one is probably very low. If you're in cryo, time is on your side. While I think that biological reanimation is most likely not on the table when it comes to brains conserved with current technologies, digital restauration looks like a very promising avenue.
4) Religious/philosophical problems: as failure modes go, these certainly stand out. Technically, they don't belong here, nevertheless some variant of religious reasoning is included in many of these lists. - I'm going to discard these points though (including the "probability" that our minds are not entirely based on a material substrate), because if those matter to someone the discussion is already over.
Your "3" doesn't include the chance that restoration is impossible, overly expensive, or not done for some other reason (no one is interested in you).
Your "1" doesn't include the chance that not everything we care about
is preserved with current techniques. Also people might make a mistake
in the freezing process. [...]
Your "3" doesn't include the chance that restoration is impossible
overly expensive,
or not done for some other reason (no one is interested in you).
So I don't consider Ritchie's death without cryopreservation any more of a tragedy than the death itself.
As an analogy think about how we feel about people 2000 years ago - if we could have just a few comprehensive samples of something in their world, we would really like it. Even things like exhaustive lists of every word they said for a week would be incredibly useful for linguists, lists of everything they ate would be useful, etc.
We shouldn't rely on their choices of what is worth preserving - we should adopt a broad based approach and try to preserve the maximum amount of things, and hope it will be useful later on.
I think today we have even used graffiti preserved on the walls of Pompei to get an idea of what the ancient world was like - surely there would be valuable information stored in even an imperfectly-frozen brain?
Who knows what kind of crazy theories they may have in the future, that they just would need to have a few brains to test out with?
Why not redefine the question as will life extension actually help?
There are far too many easily identifiable things that could go wrong in the process for me to even consider dumping money into such hokum. These are the same type of people that were insisting the world double up on alchemy research two thousand years ago.
Would have been happier if the article was "as more people fall to chronically painful illnesses, isn't it time we act?"
It's a great idea. Evolution is about the dumbest possible optimization process which still works. I don't see Google throwing its hands up and saying 'screw engineering Bigtable or MapReduce with our silly minds, we'll just evolve those fuckers!'
Science: it works, bitches. (With apologies to http://www.xkcd.com/54/)
solution: the next generation.
Hackers of all people ought to know that no matter what your models say, it's all bullshit until you test it. And as far as I know, there's not even a model generally accepted by the scientific community that indicates any reasonable probability of success anyway.
Repairing brain damage is extremely valuable to people who suffer from it, and to society. Sure there are more direct ways to fund brain damage research, but you don't get the same motivation; this feels like a selfish benefit to the person who spends on it so it is more likely to compete with luxuries instead of charitable causes.
At a minimum there should be a very large and prestigious prize (like the X-Prize) for milestones such as demonstrating organized whole brain electrical activity.
No one knows for sure if there's anything on the other side, but I definitely don't want to stick around this world forever. Immortality would be a curse.
Obviously nobody really wants to be immortal and one day outlast the solar-system and eventually be left floating around in space for trillions of years.
Where can I sign up?