Cryonics success is an highly conjunctive event, depending on a number of different, roughly independent, events to happen.
Consider this list:
The cryorpreservation process as performed by current cryo companies, when executed perfectly, preserves enough information to reconstruct your personal identity. Neurobiologists and cryobiologists generally believe this is improbable, for the reasons explained in the links you cited.
Cryocompanies actually implement the cryorpreservation process susbstantially as advertised, without botching or faking it, or generally behaving incompetently. I think there is a significant (>= 50%) probability that they don’t: there have been anecdotal allegations of mis-behavior, at least one company (the Cryonics Institute) has policies that betray gross incompetence or disregard for the success of the procedure ( such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks ), and more generally, since cryocompanies operate without public oversight and without any mean to assess the quality of their work, they have every incentive to hide mistakes, take cost-saving shortcuts, use sub-par materials, equipment, unqualified staff, or even outright defraud you.
Assuming that the process has actually preserved the relevant information, technology for recover it and revive you in some way must be developed. Guessing about future technology is difficult. Historically, predicted technological advances that seemed quite obvious at some point (AGI, nuclear fusion power, space colonization, or even flying cars and jetpacks) failed to materialize, while actual technological improvements were often not widely predicted many years in advance (personal computers, cellphones, the Internet, etc.). The probability that technology many years from now goes along a trajectory we can predict is low.
Assuming that the tech is eventually developed, it must be sufficiently cheap, and future people must have an incentive to use it to revive you. It’s unclear what such an incentive could be. Revival of a few people for scientific purposes, even at a considerable cost, seems plausible, but mass revival of >thousands frozen primitives?
Your cryocompany must not suffer financial failure, or some other significant local disruption, before the tech becomes available and economically affordable. Very few organizations survive more than one century, and those which do, often radically alter their mission. Even worse, it is plausible that before revival tech becomes available, radical life extension becomes available, and therefore people stop signing up for cryonics. Cryocompanies might be required to go on for many decades or centuries without new customers. It’s unclear that they could remain financially viable and motivated in this condition. The further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that your cryocompany will still exist.
Regional or planetary disasters, either natural (earthquake, flood, hurricane, volcanic eruption, asteroid strike, etc.) or human-made (war, economic crisis, demographic crisis due to environmental collapse, etc.) must not disrupt your preservation. Some of these disaster are exceptional, other hit with a certain regularity over the course of a few centuries. Again, the further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that a disaster will destroy your frozen remains before.
You can play with assigning probabilities to these events and multiplying them. I don’t recommend trusting too much any such estimate due to the fact that it is easy to fool yourself into a sense of false precision while picking numbers that suit whatever you already wanted to believe. But the takeaway point is that in order to cryonics to succeed, many things have to happen or be true in succession, and the failure of only one of them would make cryonics ultimately fail at reviving you. Therefore, I think, cryonics success is so improbable that it is not worth the cost.
″...a death which left you with a functional-enough circulatory system for cryoprotectants to get to your brain, didn’t involve major cranial trauma, and didn’t leave you exposed to extreme heat or other conditions which could irretrievably destroy large amounts of brain information. Also the ‘expert’ team, which probably consists of hobbyists or technicians who have done this at best a few times and with informal training, does everything right.”
(This is not meant as a knock against the expert teams in question, but against civilization for not making an effort to get something better together. The people involved seem to be doing the best they can with the resources they have.)
...Which pretty much rules out anything but death from chronic disease; which mostly happens when you get quite old; which means funding your cryo with term insurance is useless and you need to spring for the much more expense whole life.
(My version of) the above is essentially my reason for thinking cryonics is unlikely to have much value.
There’s a slightly subtle point in this area that I think often gets missed. The relevant question is not “how likely is it that cryonics will work?” but “how likely is it that cryonics will both work and be needed?”. A substantial amount of the probability that cryonics does something useful, I think, comes from scenarios where there’s huge technological progress within the next century or thereabouts (because if it takes longer then there’s much less chance that the cryonics companies are still around and haven’t lost their patients in accidents, wars, etc.) -- but conditional on that it’s quite likely that the huge technological progress actually happens fast enough that someone reasonably young (like Chris) ends up getting magical life extension without needing to die and be revived first.
So the window within which there’s value in signing up for cryonics is where huge progress happens soon but not too soon. You’re betting on an upper as well as a lower bound to the rate of progress.
There’s a slightly subtle point in this area that I think often gets missed.
I have seen a number of people make (and withdraw) this point, but it doesn’t make sense, since both the costs and benefits change (you stop buying life insurance when you no longer need it, so costs decline in the same ballpark as benefits).
Contrast with the following question:
“Why buy fire insurance for 2014, if in 2075 anti-fire technology will be so advanced that fire losses are negligible?”
You pay for fire insurance this year to guard against the chance of fire this year. If fire risk goes down, the price of fire insurance goes down too, and you can cancel your insurance at will.
I don’t think that this is meant as a complete counter-argument against cryonics, but rather a point which needs to be considered when calculating the expected benefit of cryonics. For a very hypothetical example (which doesn’t reflect my beliefs) where this sort of consideration makes a big difference:
Say I’m young and healthy, so that I can be 90% confident to still be alive in 40 years time and I also believe that immortality and reanimation will become available at roughly the same time. Then the expected benefit of signing up for cryonics, all else being equal, would be about 10 times lower if I expected the relevant technologies to go online either very soon (next 40 years) or very late (longer than I would expect cryonics companies to last) than if I expected them to go online some time after I very likely died but before cryonics companies disappeared.
That would make sense if you were doing something like buying a lifetime cryonics subscription upfront that could not be refunded even in part. But it doesn’t make sense with actual insurance, where you stop buying it if is no longer useful, so costs are matched to benefits.
Life insurance, and cryonics membership fees, are paid on an annual basis
The price of life insurance is set largely based on your annual risk of death: if your risk of death is low (young, healthy, etc) then the cost of coverage will be low; if your risk of death is high the cost will be high
You can terminate both the life insurance and the cryonics membership whenever you choose, ending coverage
If you die in a year before ‘immortality’ becomes available, then it does not help you
So, in your scenario:
You have a 10% chance of dying before 40 years have passed
During the first 40 years you pay on the order of 10% of the cost of lifetime cryonics coverage (higher because there is some frontloading, e.g. membership fees not being scaled to mortality risk)
After 40 years ‘immortality’ becomes available, so you cancel your cryonics membership and insurance after only paying for life insurance priced for a 10% risk of death
In this world the potential benefits are cut by a factor of 10, but so are the costs (roughly); so the cost-benefit ratio does not change by a factor of 10
Except people do usually compare the spending on the insurance which takes low probability of need into account, to the benefits of cryonics that are calculated without taking the probability of need into account.
The issue is that it is not “cryonics or nothing”. There’s many possible actions. For example you can put money or time into better healthcare, to have a better chance of surviving until better brain preservation (at which point you may re-decide and sign up for it).
The probability of cryonics actually working is, frankly, negligible—you can not expect people to do something like this right without any testing, even if the general approach is right and it is workable in principle*. (Especially not in the alternative universe where people are crazy and you’re one of the very few sane ones), and is easily out-weighted even by minor improvements in your general health. Go subscribe to a gym, for a young person offering $500 for changing his mind that’ll probably blow cryonics out of water by orders of magnitude, cost benefit wise. Already subscribed to a gym? Work on other personal risks.
I’m assuming that cryonics proponents do agree that some level of damage—cryonics too late, for example—would result in information loss that likely can not be recovered even in principle.
Not if that 1% (seems way over optimistic to me) is more expensive than other ways to gain 1% , such as by spending money or time on better health. Really, you guys are way over-awed by the multiplication of made up probabilities by made up benefits, forgetting that all you did was making an utterly lopsided, extremely biased pros and cons list, which is a far cry from actually finding the optimum action.
There are those that argue that it’s more likely to find something benign you’ve always had and wouldn’t hurt you but you never knew about, seeing as we all have weird things in us, leading to unnecessary treatments which have risks.
Here we very often use ultrasound (and the ultrasound is done by the medical doctor rather than by a technician), it finds weird things very very well and the solution is simply to follow up later and see if its growing.
There are those that argue that it’s more likely to find something benign you’ve always had
This can only decrease the amount of useful information you’d get from the MRI, though—it can’t convert a benefit into a cost. After all, if the MRI doesn’t show more than the expected amount of weirdness, you should avoid costly treatments.
Most of these issues I was already aware of, though I did have a brief “holy crap” moment when I read this parenthetical statement:
such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks
But following the links to the explanation, I don’t think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI’s competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn’t sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it’s less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.
Their position may not be entirely rational, but I didn’t previously have any illusions about cryonics organizations being entirely rational (it seems to me cryonics literature has too much emphasis on the possibility of reviving the original meat as opposed to uploading.)
But following the links to the explanation, I don’t think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI’s competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn’t sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it’s less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.
“less likely to work” seems a bit of an euphemism. I think that the chances that this works are essentially negligible even if cryopreservation under best condition did work (which is already unlikely).
My point is that even if they don’t apply this procedure to all their patients, the fact that CI are offering it means that they are either interested in maximizing profit instead of success probability, and/or they don’t know what they are doing, which is consistent with some claims by Mike Darwin (who, however, might have had an axe to grind).
Signing up for cryonics is always buying a pig in a poke because you have no way of directly evaluating the quality of the provider work within your lifetime, therefore the reputation of the provider is paramount. If the provider behaves in a way which is consistent with greed or incompetence, it is an extremely bad sign.
Read a bit of Mike Darwin’s complaints, those look more serious. I will have to look into that further. Can you give me a better sense of your true (not just lower bound) estimate of the chances there’s something wrong with cryonics orgs on an institutional level that would lead to inadequate preservation even if in theory they had a working procedure in theory?
I’m not sure how to condense my informal intuition into a single number. I would say > 0.5 and < 0.9, closer to the upper bound (and even closer for the Cryonics Institute than for Alcor).
To keep the information all in one place, I’ll reply here.
Cryogenic preservation exists in the proof of tardigrades—also called waterbears—which can reanimate from temperatures as low as 0.15 K, and have sufficient neurophysiological complexity to enable analysis of neuronal structural damage.
We don’t know if the identity of a given waterbear pre-cyrobiosis is preserved post-reanimation. For that we’d need a more complex organism. However, the waterbear is idiosyncratic in its capacity for preservation; while it proves the possibility for cyrogenic preservation exists, we ourselves do not have the traits of the waterbear that facilitate its capacity for preservation.
In the human brain, there are billions of synapses—to what neurones other neurones connect, we call the connectome: this informs who you are. According to our current theoretical and practical understanding of how memories work, if synapses degrade even the slightest amount your connectome will change dramatically, and will thus represent a different person—perhaps even a lesser human (fewer memories, etcetera).
Now, let’s assume uploading becomes commonplace and you mainly care about preserving your genetic self rather than your developed self (you without most of your memories and different thought processes vs. the person you’ve endeavoured to become), so any synaptic degradation of subsistence brain areas becomes irrelevant. What will the computer upload? Into what kind of person will your synapses reorganise? Even assuming they will reorganise might ask too much of the hypothetical.
Ask yourself who—or what—you would like to cyropreserve; the more particular your answer, the more science needed to accommodate the possibility.
We don’t know if the identity of a given waterbear pre-cyrobiosis is preserved post-reanimation. For that we’d need a more complex organism.
How would you design that experiment? I would think all you’d need is a better understanding of what identity is. But maybe we mean different things by identity.
We’d need to have a means of differentiating the subject waterbear’s behaviour from other waterbears; while not exhaustive, classically conditioning a modified reflexive reaction to stimuli (desensitisation, sensitisation) or inducing LTP or LTD on a synapse, then testing whether the adaptations were retained post-reanimation, would be a starting point.
The problem comes when you try to extrapolate success in the above experiment to mean potential for more complex organisms to survive the same procedure given x. Ideally you would image all of the subjects synapses pre-freeze or pre-cryobiosis (depending on what x turns out to be), then image them again post-reanimation, and have a program search for discrepancies. Unfortunately, the closest we are to whole-brain imaging is neuronal fluorescence imaging, which doesn’t light up every synapse. Perhaps it might if we use transcranial DC or magnetic stimulation to activate every cell in the brain; doing so may explode a bunch of cells, too. I’ve just about bent over the conjecture tree by this point.
Does the waterbear experience verification and then wake up again after being thawed, or does subjective experience terminate with vitrification—subjective experience of death / oblivion—and a new waterbear with identical memories begin living?
We need to stop and (biologically) define life and death for a moment. A human can be cryogenically frozen before or after their brain shuts down; in either case, their metabolism will cease all function. This is typically a criterion of death. However if, when reanimated, the human carries on as they would from a wee kip, does this mean they have begun a new life? resumed their old life after a sojourn to the Underworld?
You see the quandary our scenario puts to this definition of life, for the waterbear does the exact above. They will suspend their metabolism, which can be considered death, reanimate when harsh environmental conditions subside, and go about their waterbearing ways. Again, do the waterbears live a subset of multiple lives within the set of one life? Quite confusing to think about, yes?
Now let’s redefine life.
A waterbear ceases all metabolic activity, resumes it, then lumbers away. In sleep, one’s state pre- and post-sleep will differ; one wakes up with changed neuronal connections, yet considers themselves the same person—or not, but let’s presume they do. Take, then, the scenario in which one’s state pre- and post-sleep does not differ; indeed, neurophysiologically speaking, it appears they’ve merely paused then recommenced their brain’s processes, just as the time 1:31:00 follows 1:30:59.
This suggests that biological life depends not on metabolic function, but on the presence of an organised system of (metabolic) processes. If the system maintains a pristine state, then it matters not how much time has passed since it last operated; the life of the system’s organism will end only when when that system becomes so corrupted as to lose the capacity for function. Sufficient corruption might amount to one specalated synapse; it might amount to a missing ganglion. Thus cyrogenics’ knottiness.
As to whether they experience verification, you’ll have to query a waterbear yourself. More seriously, for any questions on waterbear experience I refer you to a waterbear, or a waterbear philosopher. As to whether and to what degree they experience sensation when undergoing cryptobiosis, we can test to find out, but any results will be interpreted through layers of extrapolation: “Ganglion A was observed inhibiting Ganglion B via neurotransmitter D binding postsynaptic alpha receptors upon tickling the watebear’s belly; based on the conclusions of Researchers et. al., this suggests the waterbear experienced either mildly positive or extremely negative sensation.”
Going under anesthesia is a similar discontinuity in subjective experience, along with sleep, situations where people are technically dead for a few moments and then brought back to life, coma patients, and so on.
I don’t personally regard any of these as the death of one person followed by the resurrection of a new person with identical memories, so I also reject the sort of reasoning that says cryogenic resurrection, mind uploading, and Star Trek-style transportation is death.
Eliezer has a post here about similar concerns. It’s perhaps of interest to note that the PhilPapers survey revealed a fairly even split on the teletransporter problem among philosophers, with the breakdown being 36.2%/32.7%/31.1% as survive/other/die respectively.
Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don’t stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don’t remember. That’s why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don’t remember.
Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren’t useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while—hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then.
Cryonics is more of a weird edge case … we don’t know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.
I think there is a significant (>= 50%) probability that they don’t: there have been anecdotal allegations of mis-behavior, at least one company (the Cryonics Institute) has policies that betray gross incompetence or disregard for the success of the procedure ( such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks ), and more generally, since cryocompanies operate without public oversight and without any mean to assess the quality of their work, they have every incentive to hide mistakes, take cost-saving shortcuts, use sub-par materials, equipment, unqualified staff, or even outright defraud you.
Woah, really? This seems … somewhat worse than my estimation. (Note that I am not signed up, for reasons that have nothing to do with this.)
it is plausible that before revival tech becomes available, radical life extension becomes available, and therefore people stop signing up for cryonics. Cryocompanies might be required to go on for many decades or centuries without new customers. It’s unclear that they could remain financially viable and motivated in this condition.
http://www.alcor.org/cases.html A loooot of them include things going wrong, pretty clear signs that this is a novice operation with minimal experience, and so forth. Also notice that they don’t even HAVE case reports for half the patients admitted prior to ~2008.
It’s worth noting that pretty much all of these have a delay of at LEAST a day. There’s one example where they “cryopreserved” someone who had been buried for over a year, against the wishes of the family, because “that is what the member requested.” (It even includes notes that they don’t expect it to work, but the family is still $50K poorer!)
I’m not saying they’re horrible, but they really come off as enthusiastic amateurs, NOT professionals. Cryonics might work, but the modern approach is … shoddy at best, and really doesn’t strike me as matching the optimistic assumptions of people who advocate for it.
I think it’s also worth considering that a society of people who rarely die would probably have population issues, as there is a limited carrying capacity. That’s most obvious in the case of biologic humans, where even with our normal lifespan, we are already close or even above carrying capacity. In more exotic (and thus less probable, IMHO) scenarios such as Hansonian brain emulations, the carrying capacity might be perhaps higher, but it would still be fixed, or at least it would increase slowly once all the easily reachable resources on earth have been put to use (barring, of course, extreme singularity scenarios where nanomagicbots turn Jupiter into “computronium” or something, which I consider highly improbable).
Thus, if the long-lived future people are to avoid continuous cycles of population overshoot and crash, they must have some way of enforcing a population cap, whether by market forces or government regulation. This implies that reviving cryopreserved people would probably have costs other than those of the revival tech. Whoever revives you would have to split in some way their share of resources with you (or maybe in the extreme case, commit suicide to make room for you). Hanson, for instance, predicts that his brain emulation society would be a Malthusian subsistence economy. I don’t think that such a society could afford to ever revive any significant number of cryopatients, even if they had the technology (how Hanson can believe that society is likely and be still signed up for cryonics, is beyond my understanding). Even if you don’t think that a Malthusian scenario is likely, it still likely that the future will be an approximately steady-state economy, which means it would be strong disincentives against adding more people.
Even if you don’t think that a Malthusian scenario is likely, it still likely that the future will be an approximately steady-state economy, which means it would be strong disincentives against adding more people.
I’m inclined to agree, actually, but I would expect a post-scarcity “steady-state economy” large enough that absorbing such a tiny number of people is negligible.
With that said:
Honestly, it doesn’t sound all that implausible that humans will find ways to expand—if nothing else, without FTL (I infer you don’t anticipate FTL) there’s pretty much always going to be a lot of unused universe out there for many billions of years to come (until the universe expands enough we can’t reach anything, I guess.)
Brain emulations sound extremely plausible. In fact, the notion that we will never get them seems … somewhat artificial in it’s constraints. Are you sure you aren’t penalizing them merely for sounding “exotic”?
I can’t really comment on turning Jupiter into processing substrate and living there, but … could you maybe throw out some numbers regarding the amounts of processing power and population numbers you’re imagining? I think I have a higher credence for “extreme singularity scenarios” than you do, so I’d like to know where you’re coming from better.
Hanson, for instance, predicts that his brain emulation society would be a Malthusian subsistence economy. I don’t think that such a society could afford to ever revive any significant number of cryopatients, even if they had the technology (how Hanson can believe that society is likely and be still signed up for cryonics, is beyond my understanding).
That … is strange. Actually, has he talked anywhere about his views on cryonics?
Honestly, it doesn’t sound all that implausible that humans will find ways to expand—if nothing else, without FTL (I infer you don’t anticipate FTL)
Obviously I don’t anticipate FTL. Do you?
there’s pretty much always going to be a lot of unused universe out there for many billions of years to come (until the universe expands enough we can’t reach anything, I guess.)
Yes, but exploiting resources in our solar system is already difficult and costly. Currently there is nothing in space worth the cost of going there or bringing it back, maybe in the future it will be different, but I expect progress to be relatively slow. Interstellar colonization might be forever physically impossible or economically unfeasible. Even if it is feasible I expect it to be very very slow. I think that’s the best solution to Fermi’s paradox.
Tom Murphy discussed these issue here and here. He focused on proven space technology (rockets) and didn’t analyze more speculative stuff like mass drivers, but it seems to me that his whole analysis is reasonable.
Brain emulations sound extremely plausible. In fact, the notion that we will never get them seems … somewhat artificial in it’s constraints. Are you sure you aren’t penalizing them merely for sounding “exotic”?
I’m penalizing them because they seem to be far away from what current technology allows (consider the current status of the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project). It’s unclear how many hidden hurdles are there, and how long Moore’s law will continue to hold. Even if the emulation of a few human brains becomes possible, it’s unclear that the technology would scale to allow a population of billions, or trillions as Hanson predicts. Keep in mind that biological brains are much more energy efficient than modern computers.
Conditionally on radical life extension technology being available, brain emulation is more probable, since it seems to be an obvious avenue to radical life extension. But it’s not obvious that it would be cheap and scalable.
I can’t really comment on turning Jupiter into processing substrate and living there, but … could you maybe throw out some numbers regarding the amounts of processing power and population numbers you’re imagining? I think I have a higher credence for “extreme singularity scenarios” than you do, so I’d like to know where you’re coming from better.
I think the most likely scenario, at least for a few centuries, is that human will still be essentially biological and will only inhabit the Earth (except possibly for a few Earth-dependent outposts in the solar system). Realistic population sizes will be between 2 and 10 billions.
Total processing power is more difficult to estimate: it depends on how long Moore’s law (and related trends such as Koomey’s law) will continue to hold. Since there seem to be physical limits that would be hit in 30-40 years of continued exponential growth, I would estimate that 20 years is a realistic time frame. Then there is the question of how much energy and other resources people will invest into computation. I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable. Novel hardware technologies might change that, but as usual probabilities on speculative future tech should be discounted.
Prediction confirmed, then. I think you might be surprised how common anticipating that we will eventually “solve FTL” using “wormholes”, some sort of Alcubierre variant or plain old Clarke-esque New Discoveries—in sciencey circles, anyway.
I’m penalizing them because they seem to be far away from what current technology allows
I … see. OK then.
Keep in mind that biological brains are much more energy efficient than modern computers.
That seems like a more plausible objection.
Total processing power is more difficult to estimate: it depends on how long Moore’s law (and related trends such as Koomey’s law) will continue to hold. Since there seem to be physical limits that would be hit in 30-40 years of continued exponential growth, I would estimate that 20 years is a realistic time frame. Then there is the question of how much energy and other resources people will invest into computation.
I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable. Novel hardware technologies might change that, but as usual probabilities on speculative future tech should be discounted.
Hmm. I started to calculate out some stuff, but I just realized: all that really matters is how the amount of humans we can support compares to available human-supporting resources, be they virtual, biological or, I don’t know, some sort of posthuman cyborg.
So: how on earth can we calculate this?
We could use population projections—I understand the projected peak is around 2100 at 9 billion or so—but those are infamously unhelpful for futurists and, obviously, may not hold when some technology or another is introduced.
So … what about wildly irresponsible economic speculation? What’s your opinion of the idea we’ll end up in a “post-scarcity economy”, due to widespread automation etc.
Alternatively, do you think the population controls malthusians have been predicting since forever will finally materialize?
Or … basically I’m curious as to the sociological landscape you anticipate here.
So … what about wildly irresponsible economic speculation? What’s your opinion of the idea we’ll end up in a “post-scarcity economy”, due to widespread automation etc.
As long as we are talking about biologic humans (I don’t think anything else is likely, at least for a few centuries), then carrying capacity is most likely in the order of billions: each human requires a certain amount of food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare, etc. The technologies we use to provide these things are already highly efficient, hence their efficiency will probably not grow much, at least not by incremental improvement. Groundbreaking developments comparable to the invention of agriculture might make a difference, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious candidate for that which we can foresee, hence I wouldn’t consider that likely.
In optimistic scenarios, we get an approximately steady state (or slowly growing) economy with high per capita wealth, with high automation relieving many people from the necessity of working long hours, or perhaps even of working at all. In pessimistic scenarios, Malthusian predictions come true, and we get either steady state economy at subsistence level, or growth-collapse oscillations with permanent destruction of carrying capacity due to resource depletion, climate change, nuclear war, etc. up to the most extreme scenarios of total civilization breakdown or human extinction.
The technologies we use to provide these things are already highly efficient
This is certainly not true for healthcare.
Groundbreaking developments comparable to the invention of agriculture might make a difference, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious candidate for that which we can foresee
I think that making energy really cheap (“too cheap to meter”) is foreseeable and that would count as a groundbreaking development.
Do you think that modern healthcare is inefficient in energy and resource usage? Why?
I think that modern healthcare is inefficient in general cost/benefit terms: what outputs you get at the cost of which inputs. Compared to what seems achievable in the future, of course.
I think that modern healthcare is inefficient in general cost/benefit terms: what outputs you get at the cost of which inputs. Compared to what seems achievable in the future, of course.
I suppose that in optimistic scenarios one could imagine cutting labor costs using high automation, but we would probably still going to need hospitals, drug manufacturing facilities, medical equipment factories, and so on.
Fusion reactors, for example.
Always 20-30 years in the future for the last 60 years. I’m under the impression that nuclear fusion reactors might have already reached technological maturity and thus diminishing returns before becoming commercially viable.
Even if commercial fusion reactors become available, they would hardly be “too cheap to meter”. They have to use the deuterium-tritium reaction (deuterium-deuterium is considered practically unfeasible), which has two main issues: it generates lots of high-energy neutrons and tritium must be produced from lithium.
High-energy neutrons erode any material and make it radioactive. This problem exists in conventional fission reactors, but it’s more significant in fusion reactors because of the higher neutron flux. A commercial fusion reactor would probably have higher maintenance requirement and/or shorter lifespan than a fission reactor with the same power.
Lithium is not rare, but not terribly common either. If we were to produce all the energy of the world from fusion, lithium reserves would last between thousands and tens of thousands years, assuming that energy consumption does not increase. That’s clearly an abundant source of energy (in the same ballpark of uranium and thorium), but not much more abundant than other sources we are used to.
Moreover, in a fission power station the fuel costs make up only a fraction of the total costs per joule of energy. Most of the costs are fixed costs of construction, maintenance and decommissioning. A fusion power station would have similar operational and decommissioning safety issues of a fission one (although it can’t go into melt down), and probably and higher complexity, which mean that fixed cost will dominate, as for fission power.
If fusion power becomes commercially viable it would be valuable but most likely not “too cheap to meter”.
I suppose that in optimistic scenarios one could imagine cutting labor costs using high automation
No, I primarily mean new ways of treatment. For example, a hypothetical country which can easily cure Alzheimer’s would have much lower costs of medical care for the elderly. Being able to cure (as opposed to control) diabetes, a large variety of autoimmune disorders, etc. has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of health care.
Always 20-30 years in the future for the last 60 years.
Yes, but I am not saying it would happen, I’m saying this is an example of what might happen. You’re basically claiming that there will be no major breakthroughs in the foreseeable future—I disagree, but of course can’t come up with bulletproof examples :-/
No, I primarily mean new ways of treatment. For example, a hypothetical country which can easily cure Alzheimer’s would have much lower costs of medical care for the elderly. Being able to cure (as opposed to control) diabetes, a large variety of autoimmune disorders, etc. has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of health care.
I see. But the point is how much disability people will have before they die. It’s not obvious to me that it will go down, at least it has gone up in the recent past.
You’re basically claiming that there will be no major breakthroughs in the foreseeable future
I’m claiming that breakthroughs which increase the amount of available energy or other scarce resources by a huge amount don’t seem especially likely in the foreseeable future.
I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable
From Wikipedia:
Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, Moore’s law should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.[note 1][11] However, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicts that growth will slow at the end of 2013,[12] when transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years.
It’s already happening.
Current process size is ~22nm, silicon lattice size is ~0.5nm . Something around 5..10 nm is the limit for photolithography, and we don’t have any other methods of bulk manufacturing in sight. The problem with individual atoms is that you can’t place them in bulk because of the stochastic nature of the interactions.
Cryonics success is an highly conjunctive event, depending on a number of different, roughly independent, events to happen.
Consider this list:
The cryorpreservation process as performed by current cryo companies, when executed perfectly, preserves enough information to reconstruct your personal identity. Neurobiologists and cryobiologists generally believe this is improbable, for the reasons explained in the links you cited.
Cryocompanies actually implement the cryorpreservation process susbstantially as advertised, without botching or faking it, or generally behaving incompetently. I think there is a significant (>= 50%) probability that they don’t: there have been anecdotal allegations of mis-behavior, at least one company (the Cryonics Institute) has policies that betray gross incompetence or disregard for the success of the procedure ( such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks ), and more generally, since cryocompanies operate without public oversight and without any mean to assess the quality of their work, they have every incentive to hide mistakes, take cost-saving shortcuts, use sub-par materials, equipment, unqualified staff, or even outright defraud you.
Assuming that the process has actually preserved the relevant information, technology for recover it and revive you in some way must be developed. Guessing about future technology is difficult. Historically, predicted technological advances that seemed quite obvious at some point (AGI, nuclear fusion power, space colonization, or even flying cars and jetpacks) failed to materialize, while actual technological improvements were often not widely predicted many years in advance (personal computers, cellphones, the Internet, etc.). The probability that technology many years from now goes along a trajectory we can predict is low.
Assuming that the tech is eventually developed, it must be sufficiently cheap, and future people must have an incentive to use it to revive you. It’s unclear what such an incentive could be. Revival of a few people for scientific purposes, even at a considerable cost, seems plausible, but mass revival of >thousands frozen primitives?
Your cryocompany must not suffer financial failure, or some other significant local disruption, before the tech becomes available and economically affordable. Very few organizations survive more than one century, and those which do, often radically alter their mission. Even worse, it is plausible that before revival tech becomes available, radical life extension becomes available, and therefore people stop signing up for cryonics. Cryocompanies might be required to go on for many decades or centuries without new customers. It’s unclear that they could remain financially viable and motivated in this condition. The further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that your cryocompany will still exist.
Regional or planetary disasters, either natural (earthquake, flood, hurricane, volcanic eruption, asteroid strike, etc.) or human-made (war, economic crisis, demographic crisis due to environmental collapse, etc.) must not disrupt your preservation. Some of these disaster are exceptional, other hit with a certain regularity over the course of a few centuries. Again, the further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that a disaster will destroy your frozen remains before.
You can play with assigning probabilities to these events and multiplying them. I don’t recommend trusting too much any such estimate due to the fact that it is easy to fool yourself into a sense of false precision while picking numbers that suit whatever you already wanted to believe.
But the takeaway point is that in order to cryonics to succeed, many things have to happen or be true in succession, and the failure of only one of them would make cryonics ultimately fail at reviving you. Therefore, I think, cryonics success is so improbable that it is not worth the cost.
You forgot “You will die in a way that keeps your brain intact and allows you to be cryopreserved”.
″… by an expert team with specialized equipment within hours (minutes?) of your death.”
″...a death which left you with a functional-enough circulatory system for cryoprotectants to get to your brain, didn’t involve major cranial trauma, and didn’t leave you exposed to extreme heat or other conditions which could irretrievably destroy large amounts of brain information. Also the ‘expert’ team, which probably consists of hobbyists or technicians who have done this at best a few times and with informal training, does everything right.”
(This is not meant as a knock against the expert teams in question, but against civilization for not making an effort to get something better together. The people involved seem to be doing the best they can with the resources they have.)
...Which pretty much rules out anything but death from chronic disease; which mostly happens when you get quite old; which means funding your cryo with term insurance is useless and you need to spring for the much more expense whole life.
(My version of) the above is essentially my reason for thinking cryonics is unlikely to have much value.
There’s a slightly subtle point in this area that I think often gets missed. The relevant question is not “how likely is it that cryonics will work?” but “how likely is it that cryonics will both work and be needed?”. A substantial amount of the probability that cryonics does something useful, I think, comes from scenarios where there’s huge technological progress within the next century or thereabouts (because if it takes longer then there’s much less chance that the cryonics companies are still around and haven’t lost their patients in accidents, wars, etc.) -- but conditional on that it’s quite likely that the huge technological progress actually happens fast enough that someone reasonably young (like Chris) ends up getting magical life extension without needing to die and be revived first.
So the window within which there’s value in signing up for cryonics is where huge progress happens soon but not too soon. You’re betting on an upper as well as a lower bound to the rate of progress.
I have seen a number of people make (and withdraw) this point, but it doesn’t make sense, since both the costs and benefits change (you stop buying life insurance when you no longer need it, so costs decline in the same ballpark as benefits).
Contrast with the following question:
“Why buy fire insurance for 2014, if in 2075 anti-fire technology will be so advanced that fire losses are negligible?”
You pay for fire insurance this year to guard against the chance of fire this year. If fire risk goes down, the price of fire insurance goes down too, and you can cancel your insurance at will.
I don’t think that this is meant as a complete counter-argument against cryonics, but rather a point which needs to be considered when calculating the expected benefit of cryonics. For a very hypothetical example (which doesn’t reflect my beliefs) where this sort of consideration makes a big difference:
Say I’m young and healthy, so that I can be 90% confident to still be alive in 40 years time and I also believe that immortality and reanimation will become available at roughly the same time. Then the expected benefit of signing up for cryonics, all else being equal, would be about 10 times lower if I expected the relevant technologies to go online either very soon (next 40 years) or very late (longer than I would expect cryonics companies to last) than if I expected them to go online some time after I very likely died but before cryonics companies disappeared.
Edit: Fixed silly typo.
That would make sense if you were doing something like buying a lifetime cryonics subscription upfront that could not be refunded even in part. But it doesn’t make sense with actual insurance, where you stop buying it if is no longer useful, so costs are matched to benefits.
Life insurance, and cryonics membership fees, are paid on an annual basis
The price of life insurance is set largely based on your annual risk of death: if your risk of death is low (young, healthy, etc) then the cost of coverage will be low; if your risk of death is high the cost will be high
You can terminate both the life insurance and the cryonics membership whenever you choose, ending coverage
If you die in a year before ‘immortality’ becomes available, then it does not help you
So, in your scenario:
You have a 10% chance of dying before 40 years have passed
During the first 40 years you pay on the order of 10% of the cost of lifetime cryonics coverage (higher because there is some frontloading, e.g. membership fees not being scaled to mortality risk)
After 40 years ‘immortality’ becomes available, so you cancel your cryonics membership and insurance after only paying for life insurance priced for a 10% risk of death
In this world the potential benefits are cut by a factor of 10, but so are the costs (roughly); so the cost-benefit ratio does not change by a factor of 10
True. While the effect would still exist due to front-loading it would be smaller than I assumed . Thank you for pointing this out to me.
Except people do usually compare the spending on the insurance which takes low probability of need into account, to the benefits of cryonics that are calculated without taking the probability of need into account.
The issue is that it is not “cryonics or nothing”. There’s many possible actions. For example you can put money or time into better healthcare, to have a better chance of surviving until better brain preservation (at which point you may re-decide and sign up for it).
The probability of cryonics actually working is, frankly, negligible—you can not expect people to do something like this right without any testing, even if the general approach is right and it is workable in principle*. (Especially not in the alternative universe where people are crazy and you’re one of the very few sane ones), and is easily out-weighted even by minor improvements in your general health. Go subscribe to a gym, for a young person offering $500 for changing his mind that’ll probably blow cryonics out of water by orders of magnitude, cost benefit wise. Already subscribed to a gym? Work on other personal risks.
I’m assuming that cryonics proponents do agree that some level of damage—cryonics too late, for example—would result in information loss that likely can not be recovered even in principle.
ITYM “before”.
When immortality is at stake, a 91% chance is much much better than a 90% chance.
Not if that 1% (seems way over optimistic to me) is more expensive than other ways to gain 1% , such as by spending money or time on better health. Really, you guys are way over-awed by the multiplication of made up probabilities by made up benefits, forgetting that all you did was making an utterly lopsided, extremely biased pros and cons list, which is a far cry from actually finding the optimum action.
I signed up for cryonics precisely because I’m effectively out of lower cost options, and most of the other cryonicists are in a similar situation.
I wonder how good of an idea is a yearly full body MRI for early cancer detection...
There are those that argue that it’s more likely to find something benign you’ve always had and wouldn’t hurt you but you never knew about, seeing as we all have weird things in us, leading to unnecessary treatments which have risks.
What’s about growing weird things?
Here we very often use ultrasound (and the ultrasound is done by the medical doctor rather than by a technician), it finds weird things very very well and the solution is simply to follow up later and see if its growing.
This can only decrease the amount of useful information you’d get from the MRI, though—it can’t convert a benefit into a cost. After all, if the MRI doesn’t show more than the expected amount of weirdness, you should avoid costly treatments.
Most of these issues I was already aware of, though I did have a brief “holy crap” moment when I read this parenthetical statement:
But following the links to the explanation, I don’t think this impacts considerably my estimate of CI’s competence / trustworthiness. This specific issue only affects people who didn’t sign up for cryonics in advance, comes with an understandable (if not correct) rationale, and comes with acknowledgement that it’s less likely to work than the approach they use for people who were signed up for cryonics before their deaths.
Their position may not be entirely rational, but I didn’t previously have any illusions about cryonics organizations being entirely rational (it seems to me cryonics literature has too much emphasis on the possibility of reviving the original meat as opposed to uploading.)
“less likely to work” seems a bit of an euphemism. I think that the chances that this works are essentially negligible even if cryopreservation under best condition did work (which is already unlikely).
My point is that even if they don’t apply this procedure to all their patients, the fact that CI are offering it means that they are either interested in maximizing profit instead of success probability, and/or they don’t know what they are doing, which is consistent with some claims by Mike Darwin (who, however, might have had an axe to grind).
Signing up for cryonics is always buying a pig in a poke because you have no way of directly evaluating the quality of the provider work within your lifetime, therefore the reputation of the provider is paramount. If the provider behaves in a way which is consistent with greed or incompetence, it is an extremely bad sign.
Read a bit of Mike Darwin’s complaints, those look more serious. I will have to look into that further. Can you give me a better sense of your true (not just lower bound) estimate of the chances there’s something wrong with cryonics orgs on an institutional level that would lead to inadequate preservation even if in theory they had a working procedure in theory?
I’m not sure how to condense my informal intuition into a single number. I would say > 0.5 and < 0.9, closer to the upper bound (and even closer for the Cryonics Institute than for Alcor).
To keep the information all in one place, I’ll reply here.
Cryogenic preservation exists in the proof of tardigrades—also called waterbears—which can reanimate from temperatures as low as 0.15 K, and have sufficient neurophysiological complexity to enable analysis of neuronal structural damage.
We don’t know if the identity of a given waterbear pre-cyrobiosis is preserved post-reanimation. For that we’d need a more complex organism. However, the waterbear is idiosyncratic in its capacity for preservation; while it proves the possibility for cyrogenic preservation exists, we ourselves do not have the traits of the waterbear that facilitate its capacity for preservation.
In the human brain, there are billions of synapses—to what neurones other neurones connect, we call the connectome: this informs who you are. According to our current theoretical and practical understanding of how memories work, if synapses degrade even the slightest amount your connectome will change dramatically, and will thus represent a different person—perhaps even a lesser human (fewer memories, etcetera).
Now, let’s assume uploading becomes commonplace and you mainly care about preserving your genetic self rather than your developed self (you without most of your memories and different thought processes vs. the person you’ve endeavoured to become), so any synaptic degradation of subsistence brain areas becomes irrelevant. What will the computer upload? Into what kind of person will your synapses reorganise? Even assuming they will reorganise might ask too much of the hypothetical.
Ask yourself who—or what—you would like to cyropreserve; the more particular your answer, the more science needed to accommodate the possibility.
How would you design that experiment? I would think all you’d need is a better understanding of what identity is. But maybe we mean different things by identity.
We’d need to have a means of differentiating the subject waterbear’s behaviour from other waterbears; while not exhaustive, classically conditioning a modified reflexive reaction to stimuli (desensitisation, sensitisation) or inducing LTP or LTD on a synapse, then testing whether the adaptations were retained post-reanimation, would be a starting point.
The problem comes when you try to extrapolate success in the above experiment to mean potential for more complex organisms to survive the same procedure given x. Ideally you would image all of the subjects synapses pre-freeze or pre-cryobiosis (depending on what x turns out to be), then image them again post-reanimation, and have a program search for discrepancies. Unfortunately, the closest we are to whole-brain imaging is neuronal fluorescence imaging, which doesn’t light up every synapse. Perhaps it might if we use transcranial DC or magnetic stimulation to activate every cell in the brain; doing so may explode a bunch of cells, too. I’ve just about bent over the conjecture tree by this point.
Does the waterbear experience verification and then wake up again after being thawed, or does subjective experience terminate with vitrification—subjective experience of death / oblivion—and a new waterbear with identical memories begin living?
We need to stop and (biologically) define life and death for a moment. A human can be cryogenically frozen before or after their brain shuts down; in either case, their metabolism will cease all function. This is typically a criterion of death. However if, when reanimated, the human carries on as they would from a wee kip, does this mean they have begun a new life? resumed their old life after a sojourn to the Underworld?
You see the quandary our scenario puts to this definition of life, for the waterbear does the exact above. They will suspend their metabolism, which can be considered death, reanimate when harsh environmental conditions subside, and go about their waterbearing ways. Again, do the waterbears live a subset of multiple lives within the set of one life? Quite confusing to think about, yes?
Now let’s redefine life.
A waterbear ceases all metabolic activity, resumes it, then lumbers away. In sleep, one’s state pre- and post-sleep will differ; one wakes up with changed neuronal connections, yet considers themselves the same person—or not, but let’s presume they do. Take, then, the scenario in which one’s state pre- and post-sleep does not differ; indeed, neurophysiologically speaking, it appears they’ve merely paused then recommenced their brain’s processes, just as the time 1:31:00 follows 1:30:59.
This suggests that biological life depends not on metabolic function, but on the presence of an organised system of (metabolic) processes. If the system maintains a pristine state, then it matters not how much time has passed since it last operated; the life of the system’s organism will end only when when that system becomes so corrupted as to lose the capacity for function. Sufficient corruption might amount to one specalated synapse; it might amount to a missing ganglion. Thus cyrogenics’ knottiness.
As to whether they experience verification, you’ll have to query a waterbear yourself. More seriously, for any questions on waterbear experience I refer you to a waterbear, or a waterbear philosopher. As to whether and to what degree they experience sensation when undergoing cryptobiosis, we can test to find out, but any results will be interpreted through layers of extrapolation: “Ganglion A was observed inhibiting Ganglion B via neurotransmitter D binding postsynaptic alpha receptors upon tickling the watebear’s belly; based on the conclusions of Researchers et. al., this suggests the waterbear experienced either mildly positive or extremely negative sensation.”
I think the question was a practical one and “verification” should have been “vitrification.”
I considered that, but the words seemed too different to result from a typo; I’m interested to learn the fact of the matter.
I’ve edited the grandparent to accommodate your interpretation.
Going under anesthesia is a similar discontinuity in subjective experience, along with sleep, situations where people are technically dead for a few moments and then brought back to life, coma patients, and so on.
I don’t personally regard any of these as the death of one person followed by the resurrection of a new person with identical memories, so I also reject the sort of reasoning that says cryogenic resurrection, mind uploading, and Star Trek-style transportation is death.
Eliezer has a post here about similar concerns. It’s perhaps of interest to note that the PhilPapers survey revealed a fairly even split on the teletransporter problem among philosophers, with the breakdown being 36.2%/32.7%/31.1% as survive/other/die respectively.
ETA: Ah, nevermind, I see you’ve already considered this.
Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don’t stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don’t remember. That’s why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don’t remember.
Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren’t useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while—hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then.
Cryonics is more of a weird edge case … we don’t know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.
For a formula see http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/WillCryonicsWork.html (I do find the given probabilities significantly to optimistic though and lacking and references).
Woah, really? This seems … somewhat worse than my estimation. (Note that I am not signed up, for reasons that have nothing to do with this.)
This is a good point that I hadn’t heard before.
http://www.alcor.org/cases.html A loooot of them include things going wrong, pretty clear signs that this is a novice operation with minimal experience, and so forth. Also notice that they don’t even HAVE case reports for half the patients admitted prior to ~2008.
It’s worth noting that pretty much all of these have a delay of at LEAST a day. There’s one example where they “cryopreserved” someone who had been buried for over a year, against the wishes of the family, because “that is what the member requested.” (It even includes notes that they don’t expect it to work, but the family is still $50K poorer!)
I’m not saying they’re horrible, but they really come off as enthusiastic amateurs, NOT professionals. Cryonics might work, but the modern approach is … shoddy at best, and really doesn’t strike me as matching the optimistic assumptions of people who advocate for it.
Yikes. Yeah, that seems like a serious problem that needs more publicity in cryonics circles.
I think it’s also worth considering that a society of people who rarely die would probably have population issues, as there is a limited carrying capacity.
That’s most obvious in the case of biologic humans, where even with our normal lifespan, we are already close or even above carrying capacity. In more exotic (and thus less probable, IMHO) scenarios such as Hansonian brain emulations, the carrying capacity might be perhaps higher, but it would still be fixed, or at least it would increase slowly once all the easily reachable resources on earth have been put to use (barring, of course, extreme singularity scenarios where nanomagicbots turn Jupiter into “computronium” or something, which I consider highly improbable).
Thus, if the long-lived future people are to avoid continuous cycles of population overshoot and crash, they must have some way of enforcing a population cap, whether by market forces or government regulation. This implies that reviving cryopreserved people would probably have costs other than those of the revival tech. Whoever revives you would have to split in some way their share of resources with you (or maybe in the extreme case, commit suicide to make room for you).
Hanson, for instance, predicts that his brain emulation society would be a Malthusian subsistence economy. I don’t think that such a society could afford to ever revive any significant number of cryopatients, even if they had the technology (how Hanson can believe that society is likely and be still signed up for cryonics, is beyond my understanding).
Even if you don’t think that a Malthusian scenario is likely, it still likely that the future will be an approximately steady-state economy, which means it would be strong disincentives against adding more people.
I’m inclined to agree, actually, but I would expect a post-scarcity “steady-state economy” large enough that absorbing such a tiny number of people is negligible.
With that said:
Honestly, it doesn’t sound all that implausible that humans will find ways to expand—if nothing else, without FTL (I infer you don’t anticipate FTL) there’s pretty much always going to be a lot of unused universe out there for many billions of years to come (until the universe expands enough we can’t reach anything, I guess.)
Brain emulations sound extremely plausible. In fact, the notion that we will never get them seems … somewhat artificial in it’s constraints. Are you sure you aren’t penalizing them merely for sounding “exotic”?
I can’t really comment on turning Jupiter into processing substrate and living there, but … could you maybe throw out some numbers regarding the amounts of processing power and population numbers you’re imagining? I think I have a higher credence for “extreme singularity scenarios” than you do, so I’d like to know where you’re coming from better.
That … is strange. Actually, has he talked anywhere about his views on cryonics?
Obviously I don’t anticipate FTL. Do you?
Yes, but exploiting resources in our solar system is already difficult and costly. Currently there is nothing in space worth the cost of going there or bringing it back, maybe in the future it will be different, but I expect progress to be relatively slow.
Interstellar colonization might be forever physically impossible or economically unfeasible. Even if it is feasible I expect it to be very very slow. I think that’s the best solution to Fermi’s paradox.
Tom Murphy discussed these issue here and here. He focused on proven space technology (rockets) and didn’t analyze more speculative stuff like mass drivers, but it seems to me that his whole analysis is reasonable.
I’m penalizing them because they seem to be far away from what current technology allows (consider the current status of the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project).
It’s unclear how many hidden hurdles are there, and how long Moore’s law will continue to hold. Even if the emulation of a few human brains becomes possible, it’s unclear that the technology would scale to allow a population of billions, or trillions as Hanson predicts. Keep in mind that biological brains are much more energy efficient than modern computers.
Conditionally on radical life extension technology being available, brain emulation is more probable, since it seems to be an obvious avenue to radical life extension. But it’s not obvious that it would be cheap and scalable.
I think the most likely scenario, at least for a few centuries, is that human will still be essentially biological and will only inhabit the Earth (except possibly for a few Earth-dependent outposts in the solar system). Realistic population sizes will be between 2 and 10 billions.
Total processing power is more difficult to estimate: it depends on how long Moore’s law (and related trends such as Koomey’s law) will continue to hold. Since there seem to be physical limits that would be hit in 30-40 years of continued exponential growth, I would estimate that 20 years is a realistic time frame. Then there is the question of how much energy and other resources people will invest into computation.
I’d say that a growth of total computing power to between 10,000x and 10,000,000x of the current one in 20-30 years, followed by stagnation or perhaps a slow growth, seems reasonable. Novel hardware technologies might change that, but as usual probabilities on speculative future tech should be discounted.
Prediction confirmed, then. I think you might be surprised how common anticipating that we will eventually “solve FTL” using “wormholes”, some sort of Alcubierre variant or plain old Clarke-esque New Discoveries—in sciencey circles, anyway.
I … see. OK then.
That seems like a more plausible objection.
Hmm. I started to calculate out some stuff, but I just realized: all that really matters is how the amount of humans we can support compares to available human-supporting resources, be they virtual, biological or, I don’t know, some sort of posthuman cyborg.
So: how on earth can we calculate this?
We could use population projections—I understand the projected peak is around 2100 at 9 billion or so—but those are infamously unhelpful for futurists and, obviously, may not hold when some technology or another is introduced.
So … what about wildly irresponsible economic speculation? What’s your opinion of the idea we’ll end up in a “post-scarcity economy”, due to widespread automation etc.
Alternatively, do you think the population controls malthusians have been predicting since forever will finally materialize?
Or … basically I’m curious as to the sociological landscape you anticipate here.
As long as we are talking about biologic humans (I don’t think anything else is likely, at least for a few centuries), then carrying capacity is most likely in the order of billions: each human requires a certain amount of food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare, etc. The technologies we use to provide these things are already highly efficient, hence their efficiency will probably not grow much, at least not by incremental improvement.
Groundbreaking developments comparable to the invention of agriculture might make a difference, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious candidate for that which we can foresee, hence I wouldn’t consider that likely.
In optimistic scenarios, we get an approximately steady state (or slowly growing) economy with high per capita wealth, with high automation relieving many people from the necessity of working long hours, or perhaps even of working at all.
In pessimistic scenarios, Malthusian predictions come true, and we get either steady state economy at subsistence level, or growth-collapse oscillations with permanent destruction of carrying capacity due to resource depletion, climate change, nuclear war, etc. up to the most extreme scenarios of total civilization breakdown or human extinction.
This is certainly not true for healthcare.
I think that making energy really cheap (“too cheap to meter”) is foreseeable and that would count as a groundbreaking development.
Do you think that modern healthcare is inefficient in energy and resource usage? Why?
What energy source you have in mind?
I think that modern healthcare is inefficient in general cost/benefit terms: what outputs you get at the cost of which inputs. Compared to what seems achievable in the future, of course.
Fusion reactors, for example.
I suppose that in optimistic scenarios one could imagine cutting labor costs using high automation, but we would probably still going to need hospitals, drug manufacturing facilities, medical equipment factories, and so on.
Always 20-30 years in the future for the last 60 years.
I’m under the impression that nuclear fusion reactors might have already reached technological maturity and thus diminishing returns before becoming commercially viable.
Even if commercial fusion reactors become available, they would hardly be “too cheap to meter”.
They have to use the deuterium-tritium reaction (deuterium-deuterium is considered practically unfeasible), which has two main issues: it generates lots of high-energy neutrons and tritium must be produced from lithium.
High-energy neutrons erode any material and make it radioactive. This problem exists in conventional fission reactors, but it’s more significant in fusion reactors because of the higher neutron flux. A commercial fusion reactor would probably have higher maintenance requirement and/or shorter lifespan than a fission reactor with the same power.
Lithium is not rare, but not terribly common either. If we were to produce all the energy of the world from fusion, lithium reserves would last between thousands and tens of thousands years, assuming that energy consumption does not increase.
That’s clearly an abundant source of energy (in the same ballpark of uranium and thorium), but not much more abundant than other sources we are used to.
Moreover, in a fission power station the fuel costs make up only a fraction of the total costs per joule of energy. Most of the costs are fixed costs of construction, maintenance and decommissioning.
A fusion power station would have similar operational and decommissioning safety issues of a fission one (although it can’t go into melt down), and probably and higher complexity, which mean that fixed cost will dominate, as for fission power.
If fusion power becomes commercially viable it would be valuable but most likely not “too cheap to meter”.
No, I primarily mean new ways of treatment. For example, a hypothetical country which can easily cure Alzheimer’s would have much lower costs of medical care for the elderly. Being able to cure (as opposed to control) diabetes, a large variety of autoimmune disorders, etc. has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of health care.
Yes, but I am not saying it would happen, I’m saying this is an example of what might happen. You’re basically claiming that there will be no major breakthroughs in the foreseeable future—I disagree, but of course can’t come up with bulletproof examples :-/
I see. But the point is how much disability people will have before they die. It’s not obvious to me that it will go down, at least it has gone up in the recent past.
I’m claiming that breakthroughs which increase the amount of available energy or other scarce resources by a huge amount don’t seem especially likely in the foreseeable future.
From Wikipedia:
It’s already happening.
Current process size is ~22nm, silicon lattice size is ~0.5nm . Something around 5..10 nm is the limit for photolithography, and we don’t have any other methods of bulk manufacturing in sight. The problem with individual atoms is that you can’t place them in bulk because of the stochastic nature of the interactions.