Why do you think its only a 10% chance your cryonics company will screw up? That has happened before. Same with Cryonics being banned—it has happened! Over the course of a lifetime and all the time you are in hibernation you think there is only a 5% chance of that happening where you live? Yes its insane to ban Cryonics, and people are not getting any saner as technology improves.
80% chance that you are so awesomecool that future society wants to run your upload for a long time? I think its at least as likely that instead of running a simulation of every corpsicle from our Era, just the most interesting ones are run a lot of times by a lot of different people who want to interact with those simulations.
Yes we’re talking about a future with fantastic amounts of computing resources so it wouldn’t cost much, but one problem is that a lot of resources are going to be spent working out new projects to run; I’m sure there will always be more computing people would like to do than they actually can do.
Why do you think its only a 10% chance your cryonics company will screw up? That has happened before.
I assume you’re referring to the Chatsworth disaster in 1979 where after CSC’s first body in 1967, it ultimately failed and let the bodies thaw. Let’s do some quick figuring. So Chatsworth ran 12 years (1979 − 1967) and had 1 major failure. ALCOR’s first body was in 1976, and it has never failed, so that’s 37 years of operation so far with 0 major failures. CI got its first body in 1977, so that’s 36 years of operation with similarly 0 major failures. This sums to 12+36+37=85 years of operation with 1+0+0 major failures or 1 failure over 85 operation-years.
Xachariah uses the nice round figure of 100 years before revival in his comment, so I’ll just use that. If the risk of failure is 1⁄85, then the odds of going 100 years without any failures is (1-(1/85))^100 or 30% rate of success or a 70% risk of a screwup. And obviously it goes down each year that passes without CI or ALCOR screwing up so badly as to let bodies thaw, so next year it’ll look more like a 68% chance (1 - (1-(1/87))^100) and then 67% and then 66% etc.
I personally don’t expect to need cryonics before 2060, so if we hypothesized that CI & ALCOR make it until then with no Chatsworths, then that alone will drive it down to 42% (1 - (1-(1/(85+((2060-2013)*2))))^100).
And of course 70% is a crude upper bound, because Chatsworth failed early on compared to CI or ALCOR (indicating that the survival curve does not look like a constant exponential risk), those were designed in response to Chatsworth and were intended to avoid the same problem so they aren’t in the same reference class, this weights the groups equally so it ignores how CI & ALCOR have hundreds of bodies rather than the 9 that CSC had, this doesn’t take into account the arrangements between organizations to take bodies if one of them fails, and I haven’t included any other cryonics groups (I haven’t heard of any disasters elsewhere so I assume if there are active organizations besides CI & ALCOR, they must not have failed yet).
Taking these into consideration, 10% doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
The alternatives to not waking people up, if the technology exists to do so, are to either keep them frozen or let them die. At some point in time the former is probably going to cost more than revival. We can’t discount the possibility that they will just let everyone who’s not interesting die, but that would be a strange future indeed, and not one that I personally would like to be revived in.
We can’t discount the possibility that they will just let everyone who’s not interesting die, but that would be a strange future indeed, and not one that I personally would like to be revived in.
I doubt “interesting” will be the metric, but is that substantially worse than our current scenario, where we let people die as a result of them having insufficient funds to direct resources towards themselves even when said resources are in fact available?
Well, I’d chalk up today’s lack of enthusiam towards cryonics as more ignorance than anything else. You do have a point though; we do not seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping people from dying. If anything, we seem to embrace it.
Cryonics is also an instance of this, but I actually had more vanilla sorts of altruism in mind when I wrote the comment, such as medical care, clean water, mosquito nets...the resources to prevent premature death exist, I don’t think ignorance is really an issue, and the average citizen even agrees that we aught to do more, and no one really embraces pre-mature death...and yet it doesn’t always happen, largely because of the idiosyncrasies of our resource allocation system.
So my meaning is, in the future, if some frozen corpses fall through the cracks of the future resource allocation system, I wouldn’t consider that as evidence that this future is inferior to the present, nor would I consider it a strange future with alien values. Our present age allows people to fall through the cracks in much more egregious ways.
Why do you think its only a 10% chance your cryonics company will screw up? That has happened before. Same with Cryonics being banned—it has happened! Over the course of a lifetime and all the time you are in hibernation you think there is only a 5% chance of that happening where you live? Yes its insane to ban Cryonics, and people are not getting any saner as technology improves.
80% chance that you are so awesomecool that future society wants to run your upload for a long time? I think its at least as likely that instead of running a simulation of every corpsicle from our Era, just the most interesting ones are run a lot of times by a lot of different people who want to interact with those simulations.
Yes we’re talking about a future with fantastic amounts of computing resources so it wouldn’t cost much, but one problem is that a lot of resources are going to be spent working out new projects to run; I’m sure there will always be more computing people would like to do than they actually can do.
I assume you’re referring to the Chatsworth disaster in 1979 where after CSC’s first body in 1967, it ultimately failed and let the bodies thaw. Let’s do some quick figuring. So Chatsworth ran 12 years (1979 − 1967) and had 1 major failure. ALCOR’s first body was in 1976, and it has never failed, so that’s 37 years of operation so far with 0 major failures. CI got its first body in 1977, so that’s 36 years of operation with similarly 0 major failures. This sums to 12+36+37=85 years of operation with 1+0+0 major failures or 1 failure over 85 operation-years.
Xachariah uses the nice round figure of 100 years before revival in his comment, so I’ll just use that. If the risk of failure is 1⁄85, then the odds of going 100 years without any failures is
(1-(1/85))^100or 30% rate of success or a 70% risk of a screwup. And obviously it goes down each year that passes without CI or ALCOR screwing up so badly as to let bodies thaw, so next year it’ll look more like a 68% chance (1 - (1-(1/87))^100) and then 67% and then 66% etc.I personally don’t expect to need cryonics before 2060, so if we hypothesized that CI & ALCOR make it until then with no Chatsworths, then that alone will drive it down to 42% (
1 - (1-(1/(85+((2060-2013)*2))))^100).And of course 70% is a crude upper bound, because Chatsworth failed early on compared to CI or ALCOR (indicating that the survival curve does not look like a constant exponential risk), those were designed in response to Chatsworth and were intended to avoid the same problem so they aren’t in the same reference class, this weights the groups equally so it ignores how CI & ALCOR have hundreds of bodies rather than the 9 that CSC had, this doesn’t take into account the arrangements between organizations to take bodies if one of them fails, and I haven’t included any other cryonics groups (I haven’t heard of any disasters elsewhere so I assume if there are active organizations besides CI & ALCOR, they must not have failed yet).
Taking these into consideration, 10% doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
The alternatives to not waking people up, if the technology exists to do so, are to either keep them frozen or let them die. At some point in time the former is probably going to cost more than revival. We can’t discount the possibility that they will just let everyone who’s not interesting die, but that would be a strange future indeed, and not one that I personally would like to be revived in.
I doubt “interesting” will be the metric, but is that substantially worse than our current scenario, where we let people die as a result of them having insufficient funds to direct resources towards themselves even when said resources are in fact available?
Well, I’d chalk up today’s lack of enthusiam towards cryonics as more ignorance than anything else. You do have a point though; we do not seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping people from dying. If anything, we seem to embrace it.
Cryonics is also an instance of this, but I actually had more vanilla sorts of altruism in mind when I wrote the comment, such as medical care, clean water, mosquito nets...the resources to prevent premature death exist, I don’t think ignorance is really an issue, and the average citizen even agrees that we aught to do more, and no one really embraces pre-mature death...and yet it doesn’t always happen, largely because of the idiosyncrasies of our resource allocation system.
So my meaning is, in the future, if some frozen corpses fall through the cracks of the future resource allocation system, I wouldn’t consider that as evidence that this future is inferior to the present, nor would I consider it a strange future with alien values. Our present age allows people to fall through the cracks in much more egregious ways.
Perhaps people signed up for cryonics should try to make themselves as interesting as possible as publicly as possible?