Supporting cryonics as a younger person (whether by signing up or by supporting it from the sidelines) could result in earlier development of hypothermia and other related biochemical alternatives, eliminating the need for cryonics as we know it.
So you would recommend signing up at 16, even if my personal odds of dying now are pretty small?
Cryonics also doesn’t depend directly on a singularity, just either very good (compared to today) scan/emulate tech or very good cell repair tech.
What would you estimate as the probability of developing technology that will make cryonics work without a singularity?
So you would recommend signing up at 16, even if my personal odds of dying now are pretty small?
I haven’t signed up myself yet, and I’m 28, so it would be suspicious if I recommended this. (My reasons for not doing so are somewhere between financial and “ugh, paperwork.”) But I do recommend becoming actively involved in the cryonics specific subset of the transhumanism community and making long-term financial plans with this expense in mind.
What would you estimate as the probability of developing technology that will make cryonics work without a singularity?
I assign perhaps 65% likelihood to that, assuming we rule out long-range as well as short-range singularities, and assuming something like today’s best cryonics quality levels. The added risk is because a) the ceiling for non-singularity tech might be lower (it sort of rule out matrioshka brain kind of stuff, if that is relevant), and b) non-singularity tech could take longer to reach high enough levels (even as compared to distant singularities) which increases storage-time associated risks. The latter kind can be mitigated to some degree by increasing storage security—but it would have to be very close to arbitrarily low to survive for multiple thousands of years.
The likelihood of it working climbs to closer to 100% (or at least towards the chances of curing aging, which I think are in the high 90%’s in the long run, even without a singularity) if the cryostasis technology improves during our lifetimes, as the problems of cooling can then be resolved sooner and with less chance of being inherently unsolvable (for any given technological ceiling).
So you would recommend signing up at 16, even if my personal odds of dying now are pretty small?
What would you estimate as the probability of developing technology that will make cryonics work without a singularity?
I haven’t signed up myself yet, and I’m 28, so it would be suspicious if I recommended this. (My reasons for not doing so are somewhere between financial and “ugh, paperwork.”) But I do recommend becoming actively involved in the cryonics specific subset of the transhumanism community and making long-term financial plans with this expense in mind.
I assign perhaps 65% likelihood to that, assuming we rule out long-range as well as short-range singularities, and assuming something like today’s best cryonics quality levels. The added risk is because a) the ceiling for non-singularity tech might be lower (it sort of rule out matrioshka brain kind of stuff, if that is relevant), and b) non-singularity tech could take longer to reach high enough levels (even as compared to distant singularities) which increases storage-time associated risks. The latter kind can be mitigated to some degree by increasing storage security—but it would have to be very close to arbitrarily low to survive for multiple thousands of years.
The likelihood of it working climbs to closer to 100% (or at least towards the chances of curing aging, which I think are in the high 90%’s in the long run, even without a singularity) if the cryostasis technology improves during our lifetimes, as the problems of cooling can then be resolved sooner and with less chance of being inherently unsolvable (for any given technological ceiling).