Here’s the reason I don’t find this very scary. As a frozen person, you have very little of value to offer people, and will probably take some resources. Thus, if someone wants to bring you back it will likely must be mostly for your benefit, rather than because they want to enslave you or something. If the universe just has people who don’t care about you, then they just won’t revive you, and it will be the same as if you had died.
In order for you to be revived in a hellish world, the people who brought you back have to be actively malicious, which doesn’t seem very likely to me.
Many among us will spend the better part of a million dollars to preserve the life of children born so deformed and disabled that they actually will spend a significant amount of their lives in pain and the rest of it not being able to do much of what gives the rest of us pleasure or status. You don’t have to be actively malicious to think that life at any cost is a Good Thing (tm).
There’s also the theoretical possibility that the world you are revived in to is perceived as a good one by the people born in to it, but is too hard to adjust to for a very old person from a very different world. I doubt the majority of slaves would prefer death to the lives they had, but someone who had lived 80 years in freedom and the best the 21st century could offer in terms of material comforts might not be as blase about a very different status quo in the future.
If the people reviving you are not malicious then you would expect to have the option of dying again unless they don’t believe you that your life sucks too much.
Also the psychology of happiness seems to suggest that people adjust pretty well to big life changes.
Unless you are defining malicious to mean “lets me kill myself if I want to,” then being revived into a society with similar laws and values as the current U.S. would certainly make it illegal for you to kill yourself. Most of us realize we could do it if we wanted anyway, but a society that can revive you probably has more effective means of enforcing prohibitions. Even now, we already have “chemical castration” for some sex criminals.
In order for you to be revived in a hellish world, the people who brought you back have to be actively malicious, which doesn’t seem very likely to me.
They might also be high-functioning but insane, from some of the very many ways tech at the level of mucking around with physical human brains to the degree of successfully reanimating cryonics patients can go wrong. With the original imperative to revive cryonics patients intact, the ability to do so also somehow intact, but things being very, very wrong otherwise.
I think “you might wake up in hell” is actually one of the better arguments for opting out of cryonics, since some of the sort of tech you need to revive cryonics patients is also tech you could use to build unescapeable virtual hells.
Although the hellish world scenario seems unlikely it might be important to consider. At least according to my own values things like being confined to children’s books and being injected with heroin would contribute very little negative utility (if negative at all) compared to even 1 in 1000 of enduring the worst psychologically possible torture for, say, a billion years.
Ok, the cost benefit ratio between reviving someone and profiting off of their slavery might be worth considering. I’m not sure how many resources it would take to revive me or if it would be safe to assume that my brain’s abilities (or whatever was valued) would not outweigh the resources required to revive me but it seems likely now that I think of it, especially considering that all my skills would be out of date and they’d probably have eugenics or intelligence enhancers by then which would outdo my brain.
Also, the people who enslaved me would not have to be the same ones as the people who revive me. They would not be subject to the cost-benefit ratio. The people who revive me could be well-meaning, but if the world has gone to hell, there might be nothing they can do about bad entities doing horrible things.
The reviver may only revive me because they’re required to, because the company storing me has a legal agreement and can be prosecuted if they don’t. The timing of my revival may be totally arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. It might have more to do with the limit for how long a person can stay in cryo (Whether that means a tangible one, or my account runs out of money with which to stay frozen or they reach some legal limit where they’re forced to honor my contract) than with the state of the world at that time.
I don’t assume that there would be a benevolent person waiting for me. There’s just too much time between here and there and you never know what is going to happen. Maybe none of my friends sign up for cryo. Maybe there’s only a 1 in 10 chance of successful revival and I’m the only one of my group who makes it.
So, I’m not convinced that the world will not have gone to hell or that I’ll be revived by friends, but I think slavery is less likely.
Here’s the reason I don’t find this very scary. As a frozen person, you have very little of value to offer people, and will probably take some resources. Thus, if someone wants to bring you back it will likely must be mostly for your benefit, rather than because they want to enslave you or something. If the universe just has people who don’t care about you, then they just won’t revive you, and it will be the same as if you had died.
In order for you to be revived in a hellish world, the people who brought you back have to be actively malicious, which doesn’t seem very likely to me.
What do you think?
Many among us will spend the better part of a million dollars to preserve the life of children born so deformed and disabled that they actually will spend a significant amount of their lives in pain and the rest of it not being able to do much of what gives the rest of us pleasure or status. You don’t have to be actively malicious to think that life at any cost is a Good Thing (tm).
There’s also the theoretical possibility that the world you are revived in to is perceived as a good one by the people born in to it, but is too hard to adjust to for a very old person from a very different world. I doubt the majority of slaves would prefer death to the lives they had, but someone who had lived 80 years in freedom and the best the 21st century could offer in terms of material comforts might not be as blase about a very different status quo in the future.
If the people reviving you are not malicious then you would expect to have the option of dying again unless they don’t believe you that your life sucks too much.
Also the psychology of happiness seems to suggest that people adjust pretty well to big life changes.
Unless you are defining malicious to mean “lets me kill myself if I want to,” then being revived into a society with similar laws and values as the current U.S. would certainly make it illegal for you to kill yourself. Most of us realize we could do it if we wanted anyway, but a society that can revive you probably has more effective means of enforcing prohibitions. Even now, we already have “chemical castration” for some sex criminals.
Okay, that’s a good point. (I assume you meant “defining ‘not malicious’ to mean ‘lets me kill myself...’”)
They might also be high-functioning but insane, from some of the very many ways tech at the level of mucking around with physical human brains to the degree of successfully reanimating cryonics patients can go wrong. With the original imperative to revive cryonics patients intact, the ability to do so also somehow intact, but things being very, very wrong otherwise.
I think “you might wake up in hell” is actually one of the better arguments for opting out of cryonics, since some of the sort of tech you need to revive cryonics patients is also tech you could use to build unescapeable virtual hells.
Although the hellish world scenario seems unlikely it might be important to consider. At least according to my own values things like being confined to children’s books and being injected with heroin would contribute very little negative utility (if negative at all) compared to even 1 in 1000 of enduring the worst psychologically possible torture for, say, a billion years.
Ok, the cost benefit ratio between reviving someone and profiting off of their slavery might be worth considering. I’m not sure how many resources it would take to revive me or if it would be safe to assume that my brain’s abilities (or whatever was valued) would not outweigh the resources required to revive me but it seems likely now that I think of it, especially considering that all my skills would be out of date and they’d probably have eugenics or intelligence enhancers by then which would outdo my brain.
Also, the people who enslaved me would not have to be the same ones as the people who revive me. They would not be subject to the cost-benefit ratio. The people who revive me could be well-meaning, but if the world has gone to hell, there might be nothing they can do about bad entities doing horrible things.
The reviver may only revive me because they’re required to, because the company storing me has a legal agreement and can be prosecuted if they don’t. The timing of my revival may be totally arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. It might have more to do with the limit for how long a person can stay in cryo (Whether that means a tangible one, or my account runs out of money with which to stay frozen or they reach some legal limit where they’re forced to honor my contract) than with the state of the world at that time.
I don’t assume that there would be a benevolent person waiting for me. There’s just too much time between here and there and you never know what is going to happen. Maybe none of my friends sign up for cryo. Maybe there’s only a 1 in 10 chance of successful revival and I’m the only one of my group who makes it.
So, I’m not convinced that the world will not have gone to hell or that I’ll be revived by friends, but I think slavery is less likely.