I should probably blog about it, but here’s my opinion about cryonics:
What are chances that signing up for cryonics will work? I estimate it’s really really tiny, 1% or less kind of chance, even if cryonics works some day I might die in a wrong way like in a car accident or by cancer metastasis that will make me lose too much information; or will be frozen in a wrong way; or I won’t stay frozen for long enough due to hardware failure, economic crash, or whatever reasons; or future might decide not to unfreeze me; or to modify me too much upon unfreezing etc. Anything goes wrong and it’s a fail, and things tend to go wrong with first try of every new technology almost always.
What’s the benefit if it works? It could be very high like infinite youth in utopian society, but I guess it’s most likely to be moderate to high, like a few extra decades of life of someone vaguely like me.
What’s the cost? I did a quick check and it seemed very high.
The most naively calculated expected utility of that doesn’t match the price, with reasonable levels of time discounting and risk aversion it’s really a horrible proposition. It’s too much of a Pascal’s Wager if you think a small chance of a very high win makes cost and risk irrelevant.
SENS sounds like a much more likely way to achieve much very long healthy lifespans. Cryonics depends on success of SENS anyway, it’s just a bet that SENS is most likely to occur too late against chance of cryonics failing.
There are alternatives way to increasing your healthy lifespan with high expected return, low risk, and low cost—not smoking and avoiding obesity are the most obvious ones in modern Western societies. Unless you’ve done all these taking a high cost high risk chance like cryonics seems not much different than going to church every Sunday hoping afterlife really exists.
I wonder what makes you and Robin like cryonics so much. You most likely have much higher estimation of its chances. You might also have a higher estimation of its utility if it works. Or you might have lower estimation of its price, perhaps you have too much money and no idea what to do with it ;-)
I should probably blog about it, but here’s my opinion about cryonics:
What are chances that signing up for cryonics will work? I estimate it’s really really tiny, 1% or less kind of chance, even if cryonics works some day I might die in a wrong way like in a car accident or by cancer metastasis that will make me lose too much information; or will be frozen in a wrong way; or I won’t stay frozen for long enough due to hardware failure, economic crash, or whatever reasons; or future might decide not to unfreeze me; or to modify me too much upon unfreezing etc. Anything goes wrong and it’s a fail, and things tend to go wrong with first try of every new technology almost always.
What’s the benefit if it works? It could be very high like infinite youth in utopian society, but I guess it’s most likely to be moderate to high, like a few extra decades of life of someone vaguely like me.
What’s the cost? I did a quick check and it seemed very high.
The most naively calculated expected utility of that doesn’t match the price, with reasonable levels of time discounting and risk aversion it’s really a horrible proposition. It’s too much of a Pascal’s Wager if you think a small chance of a very high win makes cost and risk irrelevant.
SENS sounds like a much more likely way to achieve much very long healthy lifespans. Cryonics depends on success of SENS anyway, it’s just a bet that SENS is most likely to occur too late against chance of cryonics failing.
There are alternatives way to increasing your healthy lifespan with high expected return, low risk, and low cost—not smoking and avoiding obesity are the most obvious ones in modern Western societies. Unless you’ve done all these taking a high cost high risk chance like cryonics seems not much different than going to church every Sunday hoping afterlife really exists.
I wonder what makes you and Robin like cryonics so much. You most likely have much higher estimation of its chances. You might also have a higher estimation of its utility if it works. Or you might have lower estimation of its price, perhaps you have too much money and no idea what to do with it ;-)
The chances are tiny, but a tiny chance is preferable to no chance at all.
The benefit if it works is that you wake up as yourself, immortal in eutopia. Anything less I qualify as failure.