How, precisely, would this happen? We aren’t writing sci-fi here. There’s dozens of countries on this planet with world class R&D occurring each and every day. The key technology needed to revive frozen brains is the development of nanoscale machine tools that are versatile enough to aid in manufacturing more copies of themselves. This sort of technology would change many industries, and in the short term would give the developers of the tech (assuming they had some means of keeping control of it) enormous economic and military advantages.
a. Economic—these tools would be cheap in mass quantities because they can be used to make themselves. Nearly any manufactured good made today could probably be duplicated, and it would not require the elaborate and complex manufacturing chains that it takes today. Also, the products would be very close to atomically perfect, so there would be little need for quality control.
b. Military—high end weapons are some of the most expensive to manufacture products available, for a myriad of reasons. (I mean jets, drones, tanks, etc). Nanoscale printers would drop the price to rock bottom for each additional copy of a weapon.
A civilization armed with these tools of course would not be worried about resources or environmental damage. a. There are a lot of resources not feasible today because we can’t manufacture mining robots at rock bottom prices and send them to go after these low yield resources.
b. We suffer from a lack of energy because solar panels and high end batteries have high manufacturing costs. (the raw materials are mostly very cheap). Same goes for nuclear reactors. c. We cannot reverse environmental damage because we cannot afford to manufacture square miles worth of machinery to reverse the damage. (mostly C02 and other greenhouse gas capturing plants, but also robots to clean up various messes)
I say we revive people as soon as possible as computer simulations to give us a form of friendly AI that we can more or less trust. These people could be emulated at high speed and duplicated many times and used to counter the other risks.
I agree with you entirely on the irreversible brain damage. I think this problem can be fixed with systematic efforts to solve it (and a legal work around or a change to the laws) but this requires resources that Alcor and CI lack at the moment.
“Horn 1” of the dilemma is a Limits to Growth style crisis. It’s perfectly possible that such a limits-crisis arrives before the technology needed to expand the limits shows up to save us. (The early signs would be a major recession which never seems to end, and funding for speculative ideas like nano-machines doesn’t last.) Or another analogy would be crossing a desert with a small, leaky bottle of water and an ever-growing thirst. On the edge of the desert there is a huge lake, and the traveller reaching it will never be thirsty again. But it’s still possible to die before reaching the lake.
I see you think that the technology will arrive in time, which is a legitimate view, but then that also creates big risks of a catastrophe (we reach the lake, and it is poisonous… oops). This is “Horn 2”.
My own experience with exciting new technologies is a bit jaded, and my probability assessment for Horn 1 has been moving upward over the years. Radically-new technology always take much longer to deploy than first expected, development never proceeds at the preferred pace of the engineers, and there can be maddeningly-long delays in getting anyone to deploy, even when the tech has been proven to work. The people who provide the money usually have their own agenda and it slows everything down. Space technology is one example here. Nanotechnology looks like another (huge excitement and major funding, but almost none of it going into development of true nano-machines along Drexler’s lines.)
How, precisely, would this happen? We aren’t writing sci-fi here. There’s dozens of countries on this planet with world class R&D occurring each and every day. The key technology needed to revive frozen brains is the development of nanoscale machine tools that are versatile enough to aid in manufacturing more copies of themselves. This sort of technology would change many industries, and in the short term would give the developers of the tech (assuming they had some means of keeping control of it) enormous economic and military advantages.
a. Economic—these tools would be cheap in mass quantities because they can be used to make themselves. Nearly any manufactured good made today could probably be duplicated, and it would not require the elaborate and complex manufacturing chains that it takes today. Also, the products would be very close to atomically perfect, so there would be little need for quality control. b. Military—high end weapons are some of the most expensive to manufacture products available, for a myriad of reasons. (I mean jets, drones, tanks, etc). Nanoscale printers would drop the price to rock bottom for each additional copy of a weapon.
A civilization armed with these tools of course would not be worried about resources or environmental damage.
a. There are a lot of resources not feasible today because we can’t manufacture mining robots at rock bottom prices and send them to go after these low yield resources. b. We suffer from a lack of energy because solar panels and high end batteries have high manufacturing costs. (the raw materials are mostly very cheap). Same goes for nuclear reactors.
c. We cannot reverse environmental damage because we cannot afford to manufacture square miles worth of machinery to reverse the damage. (mostly C02 and other greenhouse gas capturing plants, but also robots to clean up various messes)
I say we revive people as soon as possible as computer simulations to give us a form of friendly AI that we can more or less trust. These people could be emulated at high speed and duplicated many times and used to counter the other risks.
I agree with you entirely on the irreversible brain damage. I think this problem can be fixed with systematic efforts to solve it (and a legal work around or a change to the laws) but this requires resources that Alcor and CI lack at the moment.
“Horn 1” of the dilemma is a Limits to Growth style crisis. It’s perfectly possible that such a limits-crisis arrives before the technology needed to expand the limits shows up to save us. (The early signs would be a major recession which never seems to end, and funding for speculative ideas like nano-machines doesn’t last.) Or another analogy would be crossing a desert with a small, leaky bottle of water and an ever-growing thirst. On the edge of the desert there is a huge lake, and the traveller reaching it will never be thirsty again. But it’s still possible to die before reaching the lake.
I see you think that the technology will arrive in time, which is a legitimate view, but then that also creates big risks of a catastrophe (we reach the lake, and it is poisonous… oops). This is “Horn 2”.
My own experience with exciting new technologies is a bit jaded, and my probability assessment for Horn 1 has been moving upward over the years. Radically-new technology always take much longer to deploy than first expected, development never proceeds at the preferred pace of the engineers, and there can be maddeningly-long delays in getting anyone to deploy, even when the tech has been proven to work. The people who provide the money usually have their own agenda and it slows everything down. Space technology is one example here. Nanotechnology looks like another (huge excitement and major funding, but almost none of it going into development of true nano-machines along Drexler’s lines.)