I think that cryonics will be achieved by genetically modifying the person to be frozen so that they produce many of the same responses to freezing that animals which can be frozen/chilled and thawed (like wood frogs) do.
Once many people are frozen using this method, there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of freezing and thawing an unmodified person.
So I think people frozen using today’s techniques may never be revived.
ADDED: That’s “may never” as in “might never”, not “will never”.
I don’t understand your logic. Genetic modification to allow a person to survive freezing and thawing would be great … but what has that to do with current cryonics patients?
It sounds rather like claiming that “flight will be achieved by genetically modifying persons to fly, so there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of flying an unmodified person”. Or, to take a metaphor that suggests work already happening, “sight will be achieved by genetically modifying persons to see, so there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of sight-enabling an unmodified person”.
It sounds rather like claiming that “flight will be achieved by genetically modifying persons to fly, so there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of flying an unmodified person”.
Yes. And that’s what I would say, if we didn’t have airplanes, and I thought that modifying people to fly would be easier than building airplanes, regardless of the performance desired. None of those things are true.
Once many people are frozen using this method, there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of freezing and thawing an unmodified person.
I think you need to spell this step out; clearly, people have no idea what you’re talking about. I assume you’re saying something like “the future will have a satiable demand for revived cryonicists, which will be insufficient to revive everyone”.
Once cryonics is regarded as a solved problem, and there is a mass market for cryonic revival using a particular suspension technology, there will be little economic or scientific incentive to try to solve the harder problem of reviving people who were suspended using older suspension technologies. Nobody will award a grant to study the problem. Nobody will fund a start-up to achieve it.
Those of you who expect people in the future to work on the problem of how to revive your brain that was suspended with today’s technology: Are you also looking forward to all the cool new games they will have developed for the Playstation 3?
Maybe not new games, but people do build emulators for obsolete platforms—as freeware, even. Gift economies aren’t uncommon when resources aren’t scarce.
Even setting aside a post-FAI economy, why should this be the case? Your PS3 metaphor is not applicable. Owners of old playstations are not an unserved market in the same way that older frozen bodies are. If PS(N) games are significantly more expensive than PS(N+1) games, people will simply buy a PS(N+1). Not an option for frozen people; older bodies will be an under served market in a way PS3 owners cannot be.
If there’s a “mass market” for revivals, clearly people are getting paid for the revivals, somehow. I see no reason why new bodies would pay, while old bodies would not. If people are being revived for historical research or historical curiosity, then older revivals will probably be MORE valuable. If it’s charitable, I don’t particularly see why altruistic people will only care about recent bodies. Further, especially if effective immortality exists, you’ll very quickly run out of recent bodies.
There might be an economic reason, in that more recent people have an easier time paying for their own revivals, because their revival is cheaper and/or their skills are more relevant. But if you’re worried about that, you can probably significantly improve your odds by setting up a trust fund for your own revival.
I think this depends greatly on how many people are in storage that can’t be revived with the current methods at hand. If it’s just a few hundred, you’re conclusion is likely correct. If it’s tens of thousands, I doubt research would stop completely
The main problem I see here is that I don’t see why the existence of better-preserved people would reduce the incentive to revive worse-preserved people.
The main problem I see here is that I don’t see why the development of better preservation methods (including GM) would reduce the incentives to revive more primitively preserved people. Do you expect the future to have a satiable demand (so to speak) for thawed cryonicists?
You’ve been in the transhumanist community for, what, at least 10 years?
I honestly have no clue what could possibly be going wrong in your mind at this moment. I do not understand what general category of malfunction corresponds to this particular mistake.
You haven’t explained how it’s a mistake in any way. It’s an extrapolation of motives that are far different than yours, but they do not seem inherently ridiculously implausible.
Certainly is it true that we’re probably not vitrifying people in the best way. Once we know how to devitrify people, we’ll probably know a lot more about how to vitrify them best.
Phil, my response to your argument is this:
In order for cryonics to work in principle, they will already have to know how to fix whatever you died of, whether it be cancer or a heart attack or being crushed in a car accident. How much more difficult do you estimate it would be to fix the problem of vitrification (fixing vitrification damage and preventing de-vitrfication damage) than fix the cause of your death?
Once many people are frozen using this method, there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of freezing and thawing an unmodified person.
So I think people frozen using today’s techniques may never be revived.
You don’t indicate a probability. Do you think it is more likely that the revival of present-day cryonics patients will be delayed with respect to those frozen later, than actually never revived? (Given that revival is eventually possible for people frozen correctly.)
In order for cryonics to work in principle, they will already have to know how to fix whatever you died of, whether it be cancer or a heart attack or being crushed in a car accident. How much more difficult do you estimate it would be to fix the problem of vitrification (fixing vitrification damage and preventing de-vitrfication damage) than fix the cause of your death?
First, I estimate it will be orders of magnitude harder to fix that damage than to fix the cause of death. Fixing cancer or many other diseases would likely be a matter of intervening with drugs or genes. Fixing damage from freezing or vitrifying is usually held to require advanced nanotechnology.
Second, I think that there will be continued motivation for work to progress on all those things (cancer, heart attacks, etc.), and so the technology for fixing them will continue to improve. But the technology for fixing the damage is not likely to continue to improve, because (warm) people won’t have a need for it.
Good. I agree with you that fixing vitrifying damage could require advanced nanotechnology and that fixing causes of the death might not.
However, I’d like to linger a moment longer on the latter. Suppose someone has died of cancer and been vitrified in a ‘good’ way that is easy to undo. Presumably, gene therapy and drugs would work to cure their cancer if they were well. However, they’ve died. What was the cause of death? To what extent is it likely that cells been damaged? Can we anticipate what might be required to make them feel well again?
Also, you didn’t comment on whether you thought a delay was more likely than no revival at all for persons inconveniently vitrified.
Let me build on this. You say (and I agree) that fixing the damage caused by vitrification is much harder than fixing most causes of death. Thus, by the time that devitrification is possible, very few new people will be vitrified (only people who want a one-way trip to the future).
This leads me to 2 conclusions:
1) Most revivals will be of people who were frozen prior to the invention of the revivification technology. Therefore, if anyone is revived, it is because people want to revive people from the past.
2) The supply of people frozen with a given technology (who are willing to be revived, as opposed to the “one-way trip” bodies) will pretty much only decrease.
Assuming people continue to want revive people from the past, they will quickly run out of the easy revivals. If they still want to revive more people, they will have strong incentives to develop new revivification technologies.
That’s a reasonable scenario. As time goes on, though, you run into a lot more what-ifs. At some point, the technology will be advanced enough that they can extract whatever information they want from your brain without reviving you.
I think it would be really interesting to talk to Hitler. But I wouldn’t do this by reviving Hitler and setting him loose. I’d keep him contained, and turn him off afterwards. Is the difference between yourself and Hitler large compared to the difference between yourself and a future post-Singularity AI possessing advanced nanotechnology?
There are many possible future worlds. Obviously I’m not speaking of possible futures in which a magical FAI can do anything you ask of it.
A sizable fraction of possible futures may contain AIs for which solving these problems are trivial, or societies with so much wealth that they can mount massive research projects for charity or fun. But the fraction of those possible futures in which reviving frozen humans is thought of as an admirable goal might not be large.
My point estimate is that, if you wanna get revived, you have to get revived before the singularity, because you’re not going to have much value afterwards.
You’ve been in the transhumanist community for, what, at least 10 years?
20, my young friend.
I honestly have no clue what could possibly be going wrong in your mind at this moment. I do not understand what general category of malfunction corresponds to this particular mistake.
And that should suggest to you that the mistake may be yours.
I think that cryonics will be achieved by genetically modifying the person to be frozen so that they produce many of the same responses to freezing that animals which can be frozen/chilled and thawed (like wood frogs) do.
Once many people are frozen using this method, there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of freezing and thawing an unmodified person.
So I think people frozen using today’s techniques may never be revived.
ADDED: That’s “may never” as in “might never”, not “will never”.
I would think post-Singularity historians would like nothing better than to revive the earliest people they could.
I don’t understand your logic. Genetic modification to allow a person to survive freezing and thawing would be great … but what has that to do with current cryonics patients?
It sounds rather like claiming that “flight will be achieved by genetically modifying persons to fly, so there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of flying an unmodified person”. Or, to take a metaphor that suggests work already happening, “sight will be achieved by genetically modifying persons to see, so there will be little incentive to work on the much-more-difficult problem of sight-enabling an unmodified person”.
Yes. And that’s what I would say, if we didn’t have airplanes, and I thought that modifying people to fly would be easier than building airplanes, regardless of the performance desired. None of those things are true.
You’re right—bad metaphor. What about the vision one?
I think you need to spell this step out; clearly, people have no idea what you’re talking about. I assume you’re saying something like “the future will have a satiable demand for revived cryonicists, which will be insufficient to revive everyone”.
Once cryonics is regarded as a solved problem, and there is a mass market for cryonic revival using a particular suspension technology, there will be little economic or scientific incentive to try to solve the harder problem of reviving people who were suspended using older suspension technologies. Nobody will award a grant to study the problem. Nobody will fund a start-up to achieve it.
Those of you who expect people in the future to work on the problem of how to revive your brain that was suspended with today’s technology: Are you also looking forward to all the cool new games they will have developed for the Playstation 3?
Maybe not new games, but people do build emulators for obsolete platforms—as freeware, even. Gift economies aren’t uncommon when resources aren’t scarce.
Even setting aside a post-FAI economy, why should this be the case? Your PS3 metaphor is not applicable. Owners of old playstations are not an unserved market in the same way that older frozen bodies are. If PS(N) games are significantly more expensive than PS(N+1) games, people will simply buy a PS(N+1). Not an option for frozen people; older bodies will be an under served market in a way PS3 owners cannot be.
If there’s a “mass market” for revivals, clearly people are getting paid for the revivals, somehow. I see no reason why new bodies would pay, while old bodies would not. If people are being revived for historical research or historical curiosity, then older revivals will probably be MORE valuable. If it’s charitable, I don’t particularly see why altruistic people will only care about recent bodies. Further, especially if effective immortality exists, you’ll very quickly run out of recent bodies.
There might be an economic reason, in that more recent people have an easier time paying for their own revivals, because their revival is cheaper and/or their skills are more relevant. But if you’re worried about that, you can probably significantly improve your odds by setting up a trust fund for your own revival.
I think this depends greatly on how many people are in storage that can’t be revived with the current methods at hand. If it’s just a few hundred, you’re conclusion is likely correct. If it’s tens of thousands, I doubt research would stop completely
Are you looking forward to all the new theater plays that are going to be written?
The main problem I see here is that I don’t see why the existence of better-preserved people would reduce the incentive to revive worse-preserved people.
The main problem I see here is that I don’t see why the development of better preservation methods (including GM) would reduce the incentives to revive more primitively preserved people. Do you expect the future to have a satiable demand (so to speak) for thawed cryonicists?
You’ve been in the transhumanist community for, what, at least 10 years?
I honestly have no clue what could possibly be going wrong in your mind at this moment. I do not understand what general category of malfunction corresponds to this particular mistake.
You haven’t explained how it’s a mistake in any way. It’s an extrapolation of motives that are far different than yours, but they do not seem inherently ridiculously implausible.
Certainly is it true that we’re probably not vitrifying people in the best way. Once we know how to devitrify people, we’ll probably know a lot more about how to vitrify them best.
Phil, my response to your argument is this:
In order for cryonics to work in principle, they will already have to know how to fix whatever you died of, whether it be cancer or a heart attack or being crushed in a car accident. How much more difficult do you estimate it would be to fix the problem of vitrification (fixing vitrification damage and preventing de-vitrfication damage) than fix the cause of your death?
You don’t indicate a probability. Do you think it is more likely that the revival of present-day cryonics patients will be delayed with respect to those frozen later, than actually never revived? (Given that revival is eventually possible for people frozen correctly.)
First, I estimate it will be orders of magnitude harder to fix that damage than to fix the cause of death. Fixing cancer or many other diseases would likely be a matter of intervening with drugs or genes. Fixing damage from freezing or vitrifying is usually held to require advanced nanotechnology.
Second, I think that there will be continued motivation for work to progress on all those things (cancer, heart attacks, etc.), and so the technology for fixing them will continue to improve. But the technology for fixing the damage is not likely to continue to improve, because (warm) people won’t have a need for it.
Good. I agree with you that fixing vitrifying damage could require advanced nanotechnology and that fixing causes of the death might not.
However, I’d like to linger a moment longer on the latter. Suppose someone has died of cancer and been vitrified in a ‘good’ way that is easy to undo. Presumably, gene therapy and drugs would work to cure their cancer if they were well. However, they’ve died. What was the cause of death? To what extent is it likely that cells been damaged? Can we anticipate what might be required to make them feel well again?
Also, you didn’t comment on whether you thought a delay was more likely than no revival at all for persons inconveniently vitrified.
Let me build on this. You say (and I agree) that fixing the damage caused by vitrification is much harder than fixing most causes of death. Thus, by the time that devitrification is possible, very few new people will be vitrified (only people who want a one-way trip to the future).
This leads me to 2 conclusions: 1) Most revivals will be of people who were frozen prior to the invention of the revivification technology. Therefore, if anyone is revived, it is because people want to revive people from the past. 2) The supply of people frozen with a given technology (who are willing to be revived, as opposed to the “one-way trip” bodies) will pretty much only decrease.
Assuming people continue to want revive people from the past, they will quickly run out of the easy revivals. If they still want to revive more people, they will have strong incentives to develop new revivification technologies.
That’s a reasonable scenario. As time goes on, though, you run into a lot more what-ifs. At some point, the technology will be advanced enough that they can extract whatever information they want from your brain without reviving you.
I think it would be really interesting to talk to Hitler. But I wouldn’t do this by reviving Hitler and setting him loose. I’d keep him contained, and turn him off afterwards. Is the difference between yourself and Hitler large compared to the difference between yourself and a future post-Singularity AI possessing advanced nanotechnology?
Seems to me it’s implicitly an example of the common category “assuming that charity (or FAI) will not be an important factor in revival”.
There are many possible future worlds. Obviously I’m not speaking of possible futures in which a magical FAI can do anything you ask of it.
A sizable fraction of possible futures may contain AIs for which solving these problems are trivial, or societies with so much wealth that they can mount massive research projects for charity or fun. But the fraction of those possible futures in which reviving frozen humans is thought of as an admirable goal might not be large.
My point estimate is that, if you wanna get revived, you have to get revived before the singularity, because you’re not going to have much value afterwards.
20, my young friend.
And that should suggest to you that the mistake may be yours.
It’s certainly evidence in favour of that position, but not enough...