| Thanks for the detailed answer. >If you believe plastination has a decent chance of preserving people's minds, you're operating under the assumption that the connectome itself will yield enough data for an upload. Ok I think this makes sense. I doubt that the connectome is sufficient. >A lot of their statements seem to focus on future viability... IIRC they talk about uploading issues under the code word "information-theoretic criterion of death", meaning that a preserved brain could be totally non-viable while still containing enough information to be uploaded; you're only dead if that information is destroyed, i.e. irretrievable "in principle" to an observer with full knowledge of human neurobiology and perfect scanning technology. >future viability of the tissue, and options for biological reanimation - but these are things I have no interest in Agree, I'm not particularly worried about viability. Side note: it is a lot easier to pitch reanimation than uploading to most people (not that it's easy either way). >One can only imagine the public outcry involving bringing conserved brains back to life will be magnitudes larger than whatever will happen in respect to AGI soon This being mildly hilarious, because the risks from non-human strong AGI are way way larger than those from reanimated humans or even uploads... >But even if they were as stable as, say a major bank: well, those fail, too. This isn't clear to me. Cryonics companies have a totally different business plan from banks. Each customer pays a large fixed cost up front before services are rendered, creating an endowment thing that should pay for them indefinitely. Specifically, they could make very conservative investments, such that it would take a world collapse to drive them under. In theory. >hundreds of years until our nano tech is sufficiently advanced. Hmmm... I think I would be pretty surprised if it took an unregulated nanotech industry more than 50--100 years to develop near-arbitrary capabilities. The roadblock to biological reanimation would be knowing what to specify to build, not the building part. (I agree that intuitively, scanning, if not actual uploading, should be much easier.) >And that's too long for two fragile companies to keep afloat in the face of economic crises, religious and cultural disapproval, incompetence and malice, accidents, disasters, and world events - any single one of which can wipe everything out. This is a pretty complicated question, but how do you think each of these risk factors would respond to broader adoption of cryonics? My guesses: economic crises: significantly mitigated, because of economies of scale making it cheaper and overall scale making companies less vulnerable to variance. E.g. cryonics companies could build their own liquid nitrogen condensation plants, which are not that expensive at scale, I believe. incompetence and malice: similar---at scale, companies could afford to defend against these religious and cultural disapproval: unclear to me; how much of a threat would this be, and how hard would it be to get people to come around? accidents: not much to do about this. Hypothetically, with extremely wide adoption of cryonics, there could be safety policy decisions made based on the calculation "How many accidents leading to non-cryopreservable brains will this lead to?". disasters and world events: no help here. At scale, could slightly defend against tamer disasters with underground bunkers or something. |
To be fair, this applies to any type of preservation/reanimation scenario.
> Specifically, they could make very conservative investments
As you said, in theory. In theory, so could banks ;)
> The roadblock to biological reanimation would be knowing what to specify to build, not the building part.
Exactly. Well, speaking from today's perspective, it's both. But yes, how to repair it and keep it alive would be a huge hassle, not to mention we simply don't have anything approaching this capability yet, even in principle. Not to forget, that at the end of this really long road, the problem has just been deferred by a few decades ;)
> but how do you think each of these risk factors would respond to broader adoption of cryonics?
No, I was talking about the other way around, since cryonics is not yet a factor in anything, it's susceptible to everything that may happen externally! We might disagree about the weight and probability of individual events, but I think we're clear on the fact that for quite a bit of time to come, cryonics is a vulnerable storage facility critically dependent on the infrastructure and benevolent indifference of our civilization - and not a concept that changes the course of anything (yet).