My bigger worry is more along the lines of “What if I am useless to the society in which I find myself and have no means to make myself useful?” Not a problem in a society that will retrofit you with the appropriate augmentations/upload you etc. and I tend to think that is more likely that not, but what if, say, the Alcore trust gets us through a half-century-long freeze and we are revived, but things have moved more slowly than one might hope, yet fast enough to make any skill sets I have obsolete? Well, if the expected utility of living is sufficiently negative I could kill myself and it would be as if I hadn’t signed up for cryonics in the first place, so we can chalk that up as a (roughly) zero utility situation. So in order to really be an issue, I would have to be in a scenario where I am not allowed to kill myself or be re-frozen etc. Now, if I am not allowed to kill myself in a net negative utility situation (I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream) that is a worst case scenario, and seems exceedingly unlikely (though I’m not sure how you can get decent bounds for that).
So my quick calculation would be something like:
P(“expected utility of living is sufficiently negative upon waking up”)*P(“I can’t kill myself” | “expected utility of living is sufficiently negative upon waking up”) = P(“cryonics is not worth it” | “cryonics is successful”)
It’s difficult to justify not signing up for cryonics if you accept that it is likely to work in an acceptable form (this is a separate calculation). AFAICT there are many more foreseeable net positive or (roughly) zero utility outcomes than foreseeable net negative utility outcomes.
My bigger worry is more along the lines of “What if I am useless to the society in which I find myself and have no means to make myself useful?” Not a problem in a society that will retrofit you with the appropriate augmentations/upload you etc. and I tend to think that is more likely that not, but what if, say, the Alcore trust gets us through a half-century-long freeze and we are revived, but things have moved more slowly than one might hope, yet fast enough to make any skill sets I have obsolete? Well, if the expected utility of living is sufficiently negative I could kill myself and it would be as if I hadn’t signed up for cryonics in the first place, so we can chalk that up as a (roughly) zero utility situation. So in order to really be an issue, I would have to be in a scenario where I am not allowed to kill myself or be re-frozen etc. Now, if I am not allowed to kill myself in a net negative utility situation (I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream) that is a worst case scenario, and seems exceedingly unlikely (though I’m not sure how you can get decent bounds for that).
So my quick calculation would be something like: P(“expected utility of living is sufficiently negative upon waking up”)*P(“I can’t kill myself” | “expected utility of living is sufficiently negative upon waking up”) = P(“cryonics is not worth it” | “cryonics is successful”)
It’s difficult to justify not signing up for cryonics if you accept that it is likely to work in an acceptable form (this is a separate calculation). AFAICT there are many more foreseeable net positive or (roughly) zero utility outcomes than foreseeable net negative utility outcomes.