| > "information-theoretic criterion of death" 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). |
Right, I agree. I was wondering about evaluating the potential business or philanthropic benefits of interventions on cryonics; e.g. funding research on effectiveness of current protocols or on developing better protocols, seeding larger operations and capturing economies of scale, advertising/PR, lobbying for rights, etc. I haven't properly thought this through at all, but I suspect that there might actually be a pretty good philanthropic argument for some kind of preservation.
Society could save big on healthcare (not to mention the disutility of being kept alive to the bitter end) by preserving anyone whose health is in severe decline; anyone who has brain cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.; anyone with imminently terminal diseases; and so on, all voluntarily of course. I believe end-of-life healthcare can typically cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is commensurate with preservation costs.
Further, it seems like I'd much rather save one person to live a long life (at the very least, thousands of years), than save two lives to live a standard life of ~50 more years. Though admittedly this depends on what you think your terminal values are, and also on difficult-to-estimate effects, e.g. the instrumental benefits of having more people alive now to help with morale or with doing stuff. And for obvious reasons this is uncomfortable to have to consider, and even more uncomfortable to actually propose as philanthropic policy.