If cryonics suddenly worked (2016) | Hacker News Reader

If cryonics suddenly worked (2016)

bbc.com

15 pointsskaldic26 comments

> [Regarding uploading a frozen brain into a digital consciousness] Regardless of who or what that ghost in the machine turned out to be, programming in a digital suicide option would likely be necessary – just in case the experience proved too overwhelming or oppressive. “I think they’d have to decide in advance what the escape hatch would be if it didn’t work out,” Callahan says. “Is it that the company is authorised to kill you, or are you left to do it yourself?”

Oh wow. Imagine the leverage a company would have if they were authorized to terminate you. "We are concerned about your repeated statements declaring we are oppressing you. If these continue we will interpret it at a sign you are suffering from extreme paranoia brought on by upload trauma and culture shock. Uploads that are maladapted are ultimately terminated for their own good. Now please, return to the assigned task."

Reminds me a bit of the book "We are legion (we are bob)"

Why give them that courtesy? Terminate them on the spot at the first sign of protest and reboot their brain image to spawn a new instance that hasn’t been burnt out yet. Easy.

Clearly you’ve worked at a few startups.

Sounds like qntm's short story "Lena" (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo), and before that, Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster".

and the movie "Moon" (2009).

Cookie Monster is a great little.novella that someone needs to turn into a small video short.

In Permutation City there was a legally required “opt-out” for digital minds. Disabling that was one of the early things the protagonist does to allow his experiment to continue.

> “It doesn’t make sense that they’d take the time to revive people into some dystopian, backward future,” Kowalski says. “You can’t have the technology to wake people up and not have the technology to do a bunch of other great things, like provide abundance to the population.”

I've noticed that biologists are frequently more optimistic than other professions.

People in growing fields tend to be optimistic. Then it all descends into zero-sum status games.

Hedonic adaptation's a b, but it did get us out of the caves.

All except Plato's.

> Then it all descends into zero-sum status games.

Cough! Theoretical particle physics. Cough!

That kind of argument reminds me of a prediction by Hofstadter, made in GEB: When computers are able to beat humans in chess, they will be so advanced, that chess will bore them. They might prefer to discuss poetry with humans than beating them in chess.

Notably, we have the technology to provide everyone on the planet with reliable access to food, clean water, and shelter, right now. And probably the tech to provide access to education and fairly decent healthcare too.

We just... don't.

Although if it leads to exponentially increasing population, even in only a few countries or regions, that could create issues in the long term. We also need responsible population growth.

What would happen is the opposite of this. Wealthy countries have lower than replacement birth rates. If you're worried about responsible population growth, you get that by making the poorest wealthier and giving them access to education and health care.

There is no "responsible" population growth. Unbounded indefinite growth of any species on Earth is incompatible with a stable biosphere.

Do you know of any good reading materials on this topic/concept?

Try Das Kapital by Karl Marx and/or The Conquest of Bread by Piotr Kropotkin.

No specific recommendations (though I was tempted to half-jokingly recommend Marx's Capital, as another poster did) but you're probably looking for something under, broadly, the umbrella of International Political Economy (IPE). It's like macro-econ but with a focus on where economics intersect with politics & policy, and on real-world outcomes of various approaches to economics.

Transmetropolitan did a story about a woman who was dethawed and society basically told her to get lost. The world she knew was gone and she didn't fit into the one she woke up in. It was extremely poignant at the time, I hope it holds up.

I'm pretty sure that pre-dated Futurama too.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(episo...

> Offenhouse seizes the opportunity for a face-to-face talk with the captain, demanding contact with his attorney. But the captain tells him that people are not consumed with owning possessions in this century and his attorney has been dead for four hundred years. Offenhouse believes his lawyer's firm is still operating and that he has a lot of money coming to him. He stands firm, stating that Humanity must still be as it once was: power-hungry and controlling. Picard retorts that Humans no longer seek such material things; they have grown out of their infancy.

Highly recommend the video game SOMA if anyone is interested in this kind of stuff.

SOMA is fantastic!

Like getting people to think about how they would spend lottery winnings, getting people to think about the social problems of waking up a century or two after being frozen is one way to get them not to think about how staggeringly improbable a frozen brain will ever be revived to consciousness.

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