Re: cryonics risk/payoff matrix

From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Wed May 09 2001 - 03:56:34 MDT


On Wed, 9 May 2001, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

> Ralph, if you wake up after being frozen, it's because SIAI succeeded
> bigtime. *If* you want a body post-Singularity, you can pick one out

Assuming, SIAI succeeds, and the AI is not Friendly?

All hard-edge Singularity scenarios are iffy. The softer the edge,
the higher the probability of survival.

> after you wake up, and I see no good reason why you would want one
> with modern DNA.
>
> Even if this isn't so, I don't see why anyone would want to be
> reanimated by a human team, especially if you could wait a couple of
> years and have a really high-res reanimation done by a
> superintelligence. (Remember, you can only be reanimated once - any

Because I don't trust the superintelligence to be motivated to
reanimate extinct primitive lifeforms. Of course it could do it,
but why *should* do it?

> information lost is lost forever.) The only thing I could see
> changing this logic would be if vitrification protocols and the legal
> environment advance to the point where you could freeze and revive a
> *healthy* human without any damage at all - in which case cryo really

This is impossible.

> would be a temporal transport method, in fee simple, for cancer
> patients and such, or even people who are too far behind on the organ
> transplant lists. But the damage done by present-day freezing is such
> that you really want an SI doing the information readout.

I don't see how that follows. Given good training sets a dumb neuronal
filter could remove the ultrastructural artifacts. The whole point of
freeze/slice/scan is that it doesn't require an out-of-this world
technology.



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