If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there’s no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.
This just shifts the question to whether promoting cryonics is an effective form of general consequentialist do-gooding. There are a lot of factors to consider, in regards to large-scale cryonics:
Effects on funding/enthusiasm for new technologies due to alignment of incentives.
Effects on mitigation of existential risks, long-term economic policies, and investments.
How much cheaper it gets when practiced on a large industrial scale.
How much more reliable it becomes when practiced on a large industrial scale.
Displacement of wasteful funeral practices.
Displacement of wasteful end-of-life medical practices.
Reduced religious fundamentalism, due to less belief in innate immortality.
Reduced luxury purchases due to altered time preferences.
Relative number of people who could be saved by cryonics but not by any other available technology.
There are some plausible negatives effects to consider as well:
A larger industry has more opportunities for corruption and mistakes, so it would probably be more regulated on a larger scale, resulting in higher administrative costs and restrictions on experimentation.
People might be less concerned with preventing some health problems (while being more concerned with others, including traffic fatalities and heart disease) as the result of risk compensation.
The pressure to cure diseases in the short term could be reduced. Some patients with terminal cases might decide to die earlier than they otherwise would (which would turn out to be permanent if cryonics fails to work for them).
However, the costs aren’t likely to outweigh (or even significantly approach) the savings and benefits in my estimation. In many cases the apparent negatives (e.g. people checking out early, or reducing the overt pressure on scientists to cure cancer ASAP) could be a blessing in disguise (less suffering, less bad data). The regulation aspect probably actually benefits from cryonics being a larger and more visible industry, as the alternative is for regulations on the topic to be passed by non-sympathetic outside industries such as death care (funeral directors associations) and tissue banking (nontransplant anatomical donation organizations).
As it stands, LN2 costs of storage are fairly minimal (around $10/year per neuro patient, going by CI figures, or $1000 per patient assuming 1% interest on a long-term deposit), and can be dramatically reduced by larger scale storage spaces. Most of the money is going into standby, administration, equipment, and so forth, which are also likely to be a) scale friendly and b) already heavily invested in by the conventional medical community.
There’s also the long-term financial services aspect. A large chunk is going into long-term savings / low-risk investment. My understanding is that this promotes economic growth.
The funds set aside for cryonics reanimation will eventually go to medical research and infrastructure to reanimate patients. This could take more than one form. Programmed nanorepair and/or uploading are the currently expected forms for today’s patients, but that expectation does not necessarily hold for all future forms of cryonics. We might, at some point in the next few decades, reduce the brain damage factor to a point where biologically based regenerative techniques (tissue printing, stem cells, synthetic microbes, etc.) are plausible enough on their own. These technologies, or at least the basic science needed to achieve them, would obviously have uses outside the domain of cryonics.
So the direct and indirect results of cryonics seem to me to be good enough that a non-hypocritical EA might plausibly think it is a good idea to promote by whatever means they can. Signing up for it oneself might be useful to boost the credibility of discussing it with friends, especially if you have a social group that includes wealthy people who might donate to cryonics research or assist the transition to a larger infrastructure down the road somewhere. The question is whether this can beat something less expensive like an Adwords campaign of equivalent ongoing cost (say $80/month).
This just shifts the question to whether promoting cryonics is an effective form of general consequentialist do-gooding. There are a lot of factors to consider, in regards to large-scale cryonics:
Effects on funding/enthusiasm for new technologies due to alignment of incentives.
Effects on mitigation of existential risks, long-term economic policies, and investments.
How much cheaper it gets when practiced on a large industrial scale.
How much more reliable it becomes when practiced on a large industrial scale.
Displacement of wasteful funeral practices.
Displacement of wasteful end-of-life medical practices.
Reduced religious fundamentalism, due to less belief in innate immortality.
Reduced luxury purchases due to altered time preferences.
Relative number of people who could be saved by cryonics but not by any other available technology.
There are some plausible negatives effects to consider as well:
A larger industry has more opportunities for corruption and mistakes, so it would probably be more regulated on a larger scale, resulting in higher administrative costs and restrictions on experimentation.
People might be less concerned with preventing some health problems (while being more concerned with others, including traffic fatalities and heart disease) as the result of risk compensation.
The pressure to cure diseases in the short term could be reduced. Some patients with terminal cases might decide to die earlier than they otherwise would (which would turn out to be permanent if cryonics fails to work for them).
However, the costs aren’t likely to outweigh (or even significantly approach) the savings and benefits in my estimation. In many cases the apparent negatives (e.g. people checking out early, or reducing the overt pressure on scientists to cure cancer ASAP) could be a blessing in disguise (less suffering, less bad data). The regulation aspect probably actually benefits from cryonics being a larger and more visible industry, as the alternative is for regulations on the topic to be passed by non-sympathetic outside industries such as death care (funeral directors associations) and tissue banking (nontransplant anatomical donation organizations).
As it stands, LN2 costs of storage are fairly minimal (around $10/year per neuro patient, going by CI figures, or $1000 per patient assuming 1% interest on a long-term deposit), and can be dramatically reduced by larger scale storage spaces. Most of the money is going into standby, administration, equipment, and so forth, which are also likely to be a) scale friendly and b) already heavily invested in by the conventional medical community.
There’s also the long-term financial services aspect. A large chunk is going into long-term savings / low-risk investment. My understanding is that this promotes economic growth.
The funds set aside for cryonics reanimation will eventually go to medical research and infrastructure to reanimate patients. This could take more than one form. Programmed nanorepair and/or uploading are the currently expected forms for today’s patients, but that expectation does not necessarily hold for all future forms of cryonics. We might, at some point in the next few decades, reduce the brain damage factor to a point where biologically based regenerative techniques (tissue printing, stem cells, synthetic microbes, etc.) are plausible enough on their own. These technologies, or at least the basic science needed to achieve them, would obviously have uses outside the domain of cryonics.
So the direct and indirect results of cryonics seem to me to be good enough that a non-hypocritical EA might plausibly think it is a good idea to promote by whatever means they can. Signing up for it oneself might be useful to boost the credibility of discussing it with friends, especially if you have a social group that includes wealthy people who might donate to cryonics research or assist the transition to a larger infrastructure down the road somewhere. The question is whether this can beat something less expensive like an Adwords campaign of equivalent ongoing cost (say $80/month).