Well, sometimes some discretion is necessary. Better the seeds of high-tech society survive in a few tightly-organized pockets than spend themselves bailing out the masses who never bothered to make their own preparations. Still, general information should be shared, that's definitely a positive sum game. Specific preparedness measures taken by individuals not so much.
Those are worthy projects. I'm probably going to continue in my own line of academic research, but I'll keep that in mind.
But it's also important to be as prepared as possible for the future getting derailed. I've actually heard people say they would rather die than live through a dark age. Their optimism is a fragile and brittle thing, apparently.
As for me, at the same time as I work to bring on the future, I will continue thinking up and implementing ways to come out on top even if the shit does hit the fan... so that I'll be in as good a position to get my local corner of civilization get back on track as I can manage.
Thinking that the future will play in the high-tech post-scarcity way I want it to would make me complacent. It's far more useful to think of risks that stand in my way and how they can be neutralized.
Fine. Given that I cannot change public opinion or government policy, what can I do as an ordinary individual to avoid civilizational risks and get us out into space.
You're right, my tone was too strident. Just heard this post-scarcity sillyness too often. I actually agree with you about solar and wind except I insert "I really really hope" before "almost all our energy will come from renewables".
To prove to yourself that technological adaptations don't always come fast enough to bail us out, imagine that for some reason oil jumps to $500/barrel tomorrow (terrorist attacks on refineries, all-out nuclear war in the Middle East, etc). Will there be enough time for everyone to switch over from gasoline fuel and feedstocks? Hell no. There is some irreducible period of time needed to upgrade the electric grid, build wind/solar/nuke installations, and reorganize our entire manufacturing and goods distribution network. During that period we will have riots, blackouts, unemployment, and food shortages. If the crisis lasts long enough, the infrastructure (what's left of it) will eventually be almost entirely independent of oil, partly because we have retooled to renewable energy and partly because we have retooled to the now cheap and abundant human/animal labor, giving up on energy-intensive technologies (automation and mass production in general, including the manufacture of wind turbines and especially solar panels). I don't know how to predict the percentage contribution of these two causes of reduced demand for oil, but I want to know, because that is the difference between a technotopia and a dark age.
Trends are funny things-- they find unexpected ways to develop. Especially if we mechanically follow them without understanding why they appear exponential. If past performance was a guaranteed predictor of future outcomes, nobody would ever lose money on the stock market.
I guess I'm just not content to sit back and let The Market and R&D work their magic. I need to understand what the actual likelihood is that we will win our race against Malthus yet again. Until I do, I must put some of my effort into preparing for and mitigating the effects of the most likely civilizational risks (and thus making a small contribution to that very race).
PS: In the long run, things don't look good for exponential growth of any sort. You might want to read this post by Robin Hanson: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/limits-to-growth.html. He is the last guy you'd expect to take Malthus seriously, but apparently Robin's intellectual integrity and ability to do the math has dragged him kicking and screaming to this repugnant conclusion. Not that I'm saying technotopia is not a worthy goal-- it's the only worthy goal, but we should go into it with our eyes open to the fact that the odds are stacked against us and we don't necesserily have a lot of time.
The biggest problem we face is post-scarcity technologies of abundance wielded by scarcity-obsessed people
I disagree. I think a bigger problem are abundance obsessed people who choose to remain ignorant of the obstacles to actually implementing theoretically possible technologies: cost, time, and social/political inertia. Just because we know how to replace unskilled labor with machines and oil with nukes doesn't mean we can retool the infrastructure overnight nor convince investors to fund a rapid cutover.
Even though futurists like you dislike thinking about nitty-gritty details, especially economics and politics, that doesn't change the fact that they are real constraints on the feasibility of your plans, and if you ignore them your plans are just as sure to fail as if you were to ignore friction or entropy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no luddite. I'm in the same singularity fan club as you are. I'm just frustrated that so many of us waste time on mental masturbation of "what if people were rational and had the same techie goals I do" instead of working on the hard problem of how to insure that our future doesn't get cut short by some stupid mundane problem like petroleum depletion pushing us back into the 1800's.
This has probably been already mentioned someplace below, but I was too lazy to go past the first page of comments so here's my version. Just let me know at which statement you stop agreeing with me.
1. Smoking is addictive and increases the risk of diseases including hypertension, atherosclerosis, cancer, and emphysema. 2. If you never start smoking, you won't get addicted to it. 3. The ability to decisions that optimize long-term benefit to one's self is lower in children than in adults. 4. The younger a group of children is, the larger the fraction of them that would opt to start smoking (and risk addiction) if offered the opportunity to do so. 5. The lower the age at which one is first permitted to smoke, the larger percentage of nicotine addicts we will end up with. 6. With increasing age, the curve asymptotically approaches a flat line (i.e. there will always be some tiny number of smokers out there). 7. Your opinion on the appropriate age for smoking to be permitted is based on the value you place on each incremental decrease in the number of nicotine addicts versus the cost you assign to the enforcement of these laws (cost to taxpayers, restriction on free enterprise, abridgement of freedoms, etc.). 8. The consensus opinion in the US appears to be that the value of fewer smokers and the cost of enforcement balance out somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 years of age.
I see a debate here on whether the animal welfare regulations we have are good as they are or need to be extended. As a research biologist, I'll go out on a limb and say that we have too many restrictions on animal research and need to repeal a few.
* Anytime experimental data take us in a new direction, we have to justify our protocol ammendments to the local IACUC. Needless red tape, which adds up over the course of a year and slows the pace of research while costing the institution money that will in no way ever benefit human patients.
* IACUC has a history of rejecting certain experiments on the grounds of pain and suffering despite a very solid scientific rationale. An example from my field is hyperoxia. We are no longer permitted to study the response of mice to excessive oxygen levels. This line of research is directly relevant to human patients undergoing operations under anaesthesia.
* In many institutions (not ours, thank goodness), IACUC refuses to allow mice to die from old age; they have to be euthenized instead. Because allowing them to live out their natural lifespan is considered painful and cruel (although when it happens to you and your family, apparently it's not cruel). So if you're trying to study longevity and the biological aging process at one of these institutions you're shit out of luck.
* The mousetraps our janitors place around the lab wouldn't meet the stringent animal welfare requirements that our procedures with experimental mice have to meet.
* Mouse housing density can be at least 25% higher than it is, and cages can be changed less often than they are, with no harm to the animals but with a substantial savings on per-diem costs. But we don't do this, because of the existing animal welfare regulations.
* Money is wasted developing training programs that experienced animal technicians and scientists are forced to waste their time taking every year. What, they're worried we forgot from the previous year? This is the second biggest joke in our lab after the "security awareness" quizzes we're supposed to take.
Health care for you, your family, and your pets costs more than it needs to, and advances slower than it's capable of, because of the animal welfare red tape the animal rights activists have already foisted on you. It's not enough to prosecute the ones who aren't satisfied with the legislative damage they've already done. Now that it's becoming more and more obvious that their agenda is to hamper progress in the life sciences and they never were dealing in good faith, we should lobby to repeal the laws they helped railroad through.
When animal research is crippled in the US and EU, it will move Singapore, Korea, Japan, and China where there are fewer intellectually lazy bourgeois kids who want to play at being revolutionaries. If Western society has degenerated to the point where it won't stand up to these bomb-tossing anarcho-idiots, we deserve to lose our technological leadership in the biomedical field.
What I don't get is what exactly the research was. UCLA is a public institution right? So if they aren't telling, chances are that it really is something pretty upsetting -or- it's being paid for by a drug company / the gov't, in which case you can be really sure it's not something respectable.
Or maybe because, like anybody else in their situation, they don't want to interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation by making public comments on it prematurely.
Or at least I'm sure many of them *call* themselves anarchists. Which these days seems to mean they're for replacing the big-business/big-government with community based collectives. Anybody who's lived under the thumb of a particularly sanctimonious homeowner's association knows that it's no big victory for freedom to replace a big tyranical bureaucracy with thousands of small tyranical bureaucracies.
Because in the off chance that it works you will have out-stayed your welcome? Not really and that could easily apply to all medical technology. The difference is that most people accept living our lives in our given time with a pretty set (and arbitrary) life-span expectation. You seek to live your life in both our time and someone elses (aka the future).
I don't know if this is your actual point of view or if you're representing a common objection that might come up, but I suspect it's there somewhere below the surface for a lot of people, especially the "precautionary principle" crowd. The assumption seems to be that the universe belongs to someone else (God, future generations) and we are mere guests or tennants in it. I think what we have here may be the future's equivalent to the increasingly irrelevant liberal/conservative dichotomy of today.
As a future-liberal I believe that the universe doesn't belong to anybody, and everyone is free to attempt to survive in it for as long as they can manage. How long an individual has lived doesn't make them have any less right to continue living than other individuals. To argue otherwise requires an implicit belief in a universal moral authority that determines how long people have a right to live.
How about your own belief system? I guess you'll be in the first category then. I was a bit cavalier about the irrationality of my opponents. But almost every argument I've heard against cryonics falls into one of the following categories:
1. Low likelihood of revival. Rebuttal: Yes, and the alternative offers zero likelihood of revival. So what's better, low or zero? Nothing to lose except life insurance premiums.
2. Unpleasant future. Rebuttal: You have to make some extreme assumptions to postulate a future that is not only so unpleasant that you would prefer to stay dead, but also one where you'd be incapable of killing yourself. I'll take my chances.
3. It's selfish. Rebuttal: Irrational argument, this has no significant impact on any individual other than the one undergoing the procedure. Feel that we all owe something to those less fortunate? Why are you singling out cryonics? Go find someone with whom to argue about estate taxes and progressive income taxes instead.
4. Feels creepy, at some primal level I don't want to deal with it. Rebuttal: This is an irrational argument, but probably a very common one. Individuals who have discarded belief in a supernatural afterlife have thereby thrown away a very powerful coping mechanism for dealing with the tremendously unpleasant prospect of their own imminent death. They latch onto flawed alternative coping mechanisms such as acceptance or avoidance. Either way, they get very uncomfortable when these coping mechanisms are in turn called into question. At a time when technology hadn't caught up yet, these mechanisms were about the best you could do for remaining sane. Now, however, they're becoming mental blocks and self-fulfilling prophecies that prevent humanity from finally tackling the problem of limited lifespans as vigorously as we otherwise would.
5. I've already made up my mind to oppose this no matter what you say (parent poster's argument) Rebuttal: Irrational argument, probably motivated by argument #4.
The entire human genome? WTF are you talking about? You go to the gym, take some breath mints, and try relating to women as real people. You don't know jack about me.
Even though techincal obstacles loom large, they're not what I'm worried about-- we're looking at an indefinite R&D time window, after all.
The real threats are...
1. The cryonics community failing to self-identify as a religion entitled to the same constitutional protections as any other collection of nut-jobs with a shared opinion about the soul and the afterlife. Without these protections, as we get on the public's radar, we will become easy prey for luddites like Jeremy Rifkin, Leon Kass, and Peter Singer.
2. Economic upheavals so extreme that they would cause even the very risk-averse cryonics companies to go under. At the moment, the leading candidates for triggering such upheavals are peak oil and climate change. So as cryonicists we need to do what we can during our brief first lifetimes to make society's transition away from petroleum and its adjustment to climate change as smooth as possible.
You have a valid point. I'm not concerned about this type of discontinuity for the reasons that the first child-post addresses. However I am concerned about non-Moraveckian uploads for this precise reason, and am thinking of having a stipulation in my will asking that I not be subjected to a destructive upload unless it's an incremental (neuron by neuron) one and I am conscious the whole time.
But that's getting beside the point of my original question-- I have a set of beliefs about the afterlife. By entering in a cryonics contract, I am acting in accordance with my beliefs and not hurting anybody else. Why should my opting for cryonics present the slightest ethical dilemma that anybody else should concern themselves with?
Yes, I am equating the importance of transhumanism, specifically cryonicism, to that of a religious belief. Because I don't want some moralizing luddite asshole who pretends to be a bioethicist whip up public paranoia and get cryonics banned or regulated into oblivion. Apparently having an opinion isn't good enough in this country, it has to be a religion. So fine, my religion compells me to seek cryonic suspension upon my death.
Transhumanism is my religion. Belief in soul? Check. Belief in afterlife? Check. Millenialism? Check, singularity. Supreme being? Check, coming up, to be built by humans. Creation myth? Check, big-bang followed by planetary formation and evolution.
If you disagree with my religion because of your own religion, being tolerant people we'll just have to agree to disagree instead of me being automatically wrong.
If you disagree with my religion on rational grounds, I'll be happy to debate you. The debate will end with you either admitting that your grounds aren't as rational as you thought they were (but sticking to them) or with you going over to the cryonics side.
Assuming continued rule of law, never. Wven though I'd be legally dead for an indeterminate length of time, they'd be in violation of the contract (and could perhaps be sued by my estate or my descendants) if they thaw me for any reason other than to revive me and/or reconstitute my personality and memories in a brain-like substrate.
Not necesserily. There exist vitrification compounds that prevent ice crystals from forming, and instead the water congeals into an ice-like substance. That's why embryos can be frozen solid and revived, as can certain tissues destined for transplant.
Not so. There exist vitrification compounds that prevent ice crystals from forming, and instead the water congeals into an ice-like substance. That's why embryos can be frozen solid and revived, as can certain tissues destined for transplant.
I don't have kids. I'm not contributing to the population problem.
Anyway, I don't see how having a few billion people in underground or orbital cryogenic vaults could make the population problem worse. They're not driving, polluting, or voting idiots into office.
I'm missing something here. What are the ethical problems? It is my belief that my soul is encoded in my pattern of neural connections, and therefore the only way for me to preserve my soul at this time is to preserve my physical brain. In accordance with my belief, I spend my own money on a life insurance policy and name a cryonics company as the beneficiary. Of my own free will I enter into a contract with this cryonics company whereby they agree to place me in suspended animation as soon as possible after I am prounounced dead. Some people want to be cremated, some want to be buried, I want to be frozen. Explain to me the ethical problem here.
Oh, you must mean the ethical problem of society being full of reactionary sanctimonous busy-bodies who think they know what's best for me. I agree, this is a big ethical problem, and thank you for agreeing that they should get off our backs and let us do as we like with our bodies and our estates.
Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans
Let's see how it would make Wired sound if we changed the original sentence to apply to some more popular and better armed belief systems:
Long the domain of Christian nut-jobs, cosmologists report that the age of the universe is an overestimate and now believe it to be closer to the Biblical six thousand years. ...or...
Long the domain of Muslim nut-jobs, researchers at the Royal Madrassa Institute announced hard evidence that martyrs instantly ascend to heaven. ...or...
Long the domain of Mormon nut-jobs, archaeologists have rediscovered the golden plates that Joseph Smith claimed were given to him by the angel Moroni. ...or (I triple dare you)...
Long the domain of Scientology nut-jobs, paleontologists have reported a heretofore undiscovered volcano in Hawaii showing traces of ancient alien visitors.
Would Wired have the balls to print any of the above sentences? I doubt it. Too scared of being boycotted, firebombed, or sued. So are these cowards getting a few cheap laughs at the expense of our beliefs about the soul and life after death because they know there aren't enough of us nut-jobs to fight back? At least our beliefs are slowly coming closer to realization, unlike the anti-scientific belief systems portrayed above. Why are we the nutjobs then?
What, you're into tolerance and respect for other people's beliefs unless you outnumber them by a comfortable margin, is that the true extent of your commitment to civil liberties? Screw you Wired bigots. And the inevitable flood of Slashdot bigots who will think it's fun to bully people who have never done them or anybody else any harm whatsoever.
To clarify: I'm not saying Wired should be sued, bombed, or censored. They have a right to say what they like. Just like I have the right to say they're low-lifes for going out of their way for no particular reason to insult me and other people who share my beliefs.
50*F is 10*C, still not frozen (and who the hell uses Fahrenheit in a medical setting?!). There have been tests with cooled-down mammals including dogs and baboons since the 1950's. I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier.
...a cure for all those boring dullards lacking spontaneity and imagination. They just have a defective version of monoamine oxidase. Do not despair, muggles. We'll save you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sometimes some discretion is necessary. Better the seeds of high-tech society survive in a few tightly-organized pockets than spend themselves bailing out the masses who never bothered to make their own preparations. Still, general information should be shared, that's definitely a positive sum game. Specific preparedness measures taken by individuals not so much.
Interesting links, thanks for them.
Those are worthy projects. I'm probably going to continue in my own line of academic research, but I'll keep that in mind.
But it's also important to be as prepared as possible for the future getting derailed. I've actually heard people say they would rather die than live through a dark age. Their optimism is a fragile and brittle thing, apparently.
As for me, at the same time as I work to bring on the future, I will continue thinking up and implementing ways to come out on top even if the shit does hit the fan... so that I'll be in as good a position to get my local corner of civilization get back on track as I can manage.
Thinking that the future will play in the high-tech post-scarcity way I want it to would make me complacent. It's far more useful to think of risks that stand in my way and how they can be neutralized.
Fine. Given that I cannot change public opinion or government policy, what can I do as an ordinary individual to avoid civilizational risks and get us out into space.
Oh, and incidentally, it's the free market economists (except Robin Hanson apparently) that believe infinite growth is sustainable.
You're right, my tone was too strident. Just heard this post-scarcity sillyness too often. I actually agree with you about solar and wind except I insert "I really really hope" before "almost all our energy will come from renewables".
To prove to yourself that technological adaptations don't always come fast enough to bail us out, imagine that for some reason oil jumps to $500/barrel tomorrow (terrorist attacks on refineries, all-out nuclear war in the Middle East, etc). Will there be enough time for everyone to switch over from gasoline fuel and feedstocks? Hell no. There is some irreducible period of time needed to upgrade the electric grid, build wind/solar/nuke installations, and reorganize our entire manufacturing and goods distribution network. During that period we will have riots, blackouts, unemployment, and food shortages. If the crisis lasts long enough, the infrastructure (what's left of it) will eventually be almost entirely independent of oil, partly because we have retooled to renewable energy and partly because we have retooled to the now cheap and abundant human/animal labor, giving up on energy-intensive technologies (automation and mass production in general, including the manufacture of wind turbines and especially solar panels). I don't know how to predict the percentage contribution of these two causes of reduced demand for oil, but I want to know, because that is the difference between a technotopia and a dark age.
Trends are funny things-- they find unexpected ways to develop. Especially if we mechanically follow them without understanding why they appear exponential. If past performance was a guaranteed predictor of future outcomes, nobody would ever lose money on the stock market.
I guess I'm just not content to sit back and let The Market and R&D work their magic. I need to understand what the actual likelihood is that we will win our race against Malthus yet again. Until I do, I must put some of my effort into preparing for and mitigating the effects of the most likely civilizational risks (and thus making a small contribution to that very race).
PS: In the long run, things don't look good for exponential growth of any sort. You might want to read this post by Robin Hanson: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/limits-to-growth.html. He is the last guy you'd expect to take Malthus seriously, but apparently Robin's intellectual integrity and ability to do the math has dragged him kicking and screaming to this repugnant conclusion. Not that I'm saying technotopia is not a worthy goal-- it's the only worthy goal, but we should go into it with our eyes open to the fact that the odds are stacked against us and we don't necesserily have a lot of time.
The biggest problem we face is post-scarcity technologies of abundance wielded by scarcity-obsessed people
I disagree. I think a bigger problem are abundance obsessed people who choose to remain ignorant of the obstacles to actually implementing theoretically possible technologies: cost, time, and social/political inertia. Just because we know how to replace unskilled labor with machines and oil with nukes doesn't mean we can retool the infrastructure overnight nor convince investors to fund a rapid cutover.
Even though futurists like you dislike thinking about nitty-gritty details, especially economics and politics, that doesn't change the fact that they are real constraints on the feasibility of your plans, and if you ignore them your plans are just as sure to fail as if you were to ignore friction or entropy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no luddite. I'm in the same singularity fan club as you are. I'm just frustrated that so many of us waste time on mental masturbation of "what if people were rational and had the same techie goals I do" instead of working on the hard problem of how to insure that our future doesn't get cut short by some stupid mundane problem like petroleum depletion pushing us back into the 1800's.
This has probably been already mentioned someplace below, but I was too lazy to go past the first page of comments so here's my version. Just let me know at which statement you stop agreeing with me.
1. Smoking is addictive and increases the risk of diseases including hypertension, atherosclerosis, cancer, and emphysema.
2. If you never start smoking, you won't get addicted to it.
3. The ability to decisions that optimize long-term benefit to one's self is lower in children than in adults.
4. The younger a group of children is, the larger the fraction of them that would opt to start smoking (and risk addiction) if offered the opportunity to do so.
5. The lower the age at which one is first permitted to smoke, the larger percentage of nicotine addicts we will end up with.
6. With increasing age, the curve asymptotically approaches a flat line (i.e. there will always be some tiny number of smokers out there).
7. Your opinion on the appropriate age for smoking to be permitted is based on the value you place on each incremental decrease in the number of nicotine addicts versus the cost you assign to the enforcement of these laws (cost to taxpayers, restriction on free enterprise, abridgement of freedoms, etc.).
8. The consensus opinion in the US appears to be that the value of fewer smokers and the cost of enforcement balance out somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 years of age.
I see a debate here on whether the animal welfare regulations we have are good as they are or need to be extended. As a research biologist, I'll go out on a limb and say that we have too many restrictions on animal research and need to repeal a few.
* Anytime experimental data take us in a new direction, we have to justify our protocol ammendments to the local IACUC. Needless red tape, which adds up over the course of a year and slows the pace of research while costing the institution money that will in no way ever benefit human patients.
* IACUC has a history of rejecting certain experiments on the grounds of pain and suffering despite a very solid scientific rationale. An example from my field is hyperoxia. We are no longer permitted to study the response of mice to excessive oxygen levels. This line of research is directly relevant to human patients undergoing operations under anaesthesia.
* In many institutions (not ours, thank goodness), IACUC refuses to allow mice to die from old age; they have to be euthenized instead. Because allowing them to live out their natural lifespan is considered painful and cruel (although when it happens to you and your family, apparently it's not cruel). So if you're trying to study longevity and the biological aging process at one of these institutions you're shit out of luck.
* The mousetraps our janitors place around the lab wouldn't meet the stringent animal welfare requirements that our procedures with experimental mice have to meet.
* Mouse housing density can be at least 25% higher than it is, and cages can be changed less often than they are, with no harm to the animals but with a substantial savings on per-diem costs. But we don't do this, because of the existing animal welfare regulations.
* Money is wasted developing training programs that experienced animal technicians and scientists are forced to waste their time taking every year. What, they're worried we forgot from the previous year? This is the second biggest joke in our lab after the "security awareness" quizzes we're supposed to take.
Health care for you, your family, and your pets costs more than it needs to, and advances slower than it's capable of, because of the animal welfare red tape the animal rights activists have already foisted on you. It's not enough to prosecute the ones who aren't satisfied with the legislative damage they've already done. Now that it's becoming more and more obvious that their agenda is to hamper progress in the life sciences and they never were dealing in good faith, we should lobby to repeal the laws they helped railroad through.
When animal research is crippled in the US and EU, it will move Singapore, Korea, Japan, and China where there are fewer intellectually lazy bourgeois kids who want to play at being revolutionaries. If Western society has degenerated to the point where it won't stand up to these bomb-tossing anarcho-idiots, we deserve to lose our technological leadership in the biomedical field.
Or maybe because, like anybody else in their situation, they don't want to interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation by making public comments on it prematurely.
Or at least I'm sure many of them *call* themselves anarchists. Which these days seems to mean they're for replacing the big-business/big-government with community based collectives. Anybody who's lived under the thumb of a particularly sanctimonious homeowner's association knows that it's no big victory for freedom to replace a big tyranical bureaucracy with thousands of small tyranical bureaucracies.
I'm glad you raised the following point...
Because in the off chance that it works you will have out-stayed your welcome? Not really and that could easily apply to all medical technology. The difference is that most people accept living our lives in our given time with a pretty set (and arbitrary) life-span expectation. You seek to live your life in both our time and someone elses (aka the future).
I don't know if this is your actual point of view or if you're representing a common objection that might come up, but I suspect it's there somewhere below the surface for a lot of people, especially the "precautionary principle" crowd. The assumption seems to be that the universe belongs to someone else (God, future generations) and we are mere guests or tennants in it. I think what we have here may be the future's equivalent to the increasingly irrelevant liberal/conservative dichotomy of today.
As a future-liberal I believe that the universe doesn't belong to anybody, and everyone is free to attempt to survive in it for as long as they can manage. How long an individual has lived doesn't make them have any less right to continue living than other individuals. To argue otherwise requires an implicit belief in a universal moral authority that determines how long people have a right to live.
How about your own belief system? I guess you'll be in the first category then. I was a bit cavalier about the irrationality of my opponents. But almost every argument I've heard against cryonics falls into one of the following categories:
1. Low likelihood of revival.
Rebuttal: Yes, and the alternative offers zero likelihood of revival. So what's better, low or zero? Nothing to lose except life insurance premiums.
2. Unpleasant future.
Rebuttal: You have to make some extreme assumptions to postulate a future that is not only so unpleasant that you would prefer to stay dead, but also one where you'd be incapable of killing yourself. I'll take my chances.
3. It's selfish.
Rebuttal: Irrational argument, this has no significant impact on any individual other than the one undergoing the procedure. Feel that we all owe something to those less fortunate? Why are you singling out cryonics? Go find someone with whom to argue about estate taxes and progressive income taxes instead.
4. Feels creepy, at some primal level I don't want to deal with it.
Rebuttal: This is an irrational argument, but probably a very common one. Individuals who have discarded belief in a supernatural afterlife have thereby thrown away a very powerful coping mechanism for dealing with the tremendously unpleasant prospect of their own imminent death. They latch onto flawed alternative coping mechanisms such as acceptance or avoidance. Either way, they get very uncomfortable when these coping mechanisms are in turn called into question. At a time when technology hadn't caught up yet, these mechanisms were about the best you could do for remaining sane. Now, however, they're becoming mental blocks and self-fulfilling prophecies that prevent humanity from finally tackling the problem of limited lifespans as vigorously as we otherwise would.
5. I've already made up my mind to oppose this no matter what you say (parent poster's argument)
Rebuttal: Irrational argument, probably motivated by argument #4.
The entire human genome? WTF are you talking about? You go to the gym, take some breath mints, and try relating to women as real people. You don't know jack about me.
Even though techincal obstacles loom large, they're not what I'm worried about-- we're looking at an indefinite R&D time window, after all.
The real threats are...
1. The cryonics community failing to self-identify as a religion entitled to the same constitutional protections as any other collection of nut-jobs with a shared opinion about the soul and the afterlife. Without these protections, as we get on the public's radar, we will become easy prey for luddites like Jeremy Rifkin, Leon Kass, and Peter Singer.
2. Economic upheavals so extreme that they would cause even the very risk-averse cryonics companies to go under. At the moment, the leading candidates for triggering such upheavals are peak oil and climate change. So as cryonicists we need to do what we can during our brief first lifetimes to make society's transition away from petroleum and its adjustment to climate change as smooth as possible.
You have a valid point. I'm not concerned about this type of discontinuity for the reasons that the first child-post addresses. However I am concerned about non-Moraveckian uploads for this precise reason, and am thinking of having a stipulation in my will asking that I not be subjected to a destructive upload unless it's an incremental (neuron by neuron) one and I am conscious the whole time.
But that's getting beside the point of my original question-- I have a set of beliefs about the afterlife. By entering in a cryonics contract, I am acting in accordance with my beliefs and not hurting anybody else. Why should my opting for cryonics present the slightest ethical dilemma that anybody else should concern themselves with?
Yes, I am equating the importance of transhumanism, specifically cryonicism, to that of a religious belief. Because I don't want some moralizing luddite asshole who pretends to be a bioethicist whip up public paranoia and get cryonics banned or regulated into oblivion. Apparently having an opinion isn't good enough in this country, it has to be a religion. So fine, my religion compells me to seek cryonic suspension upon my death.
Transhumanism is my religion. Belief in soul? Check. Belief in afterlife? Check. Millenialism? Check, singularity. Supreme being? Check, coming up, to be built by humans. Creation myth? Check, big-bang followed by planetary formation and evolution.
If you disagree with my religion because of your own religion, being tolerant people we'll just have to agree to disagree instead of me being automatically wrong.
If you disagree with my religion on rational grounds, I'll be happy to debate you. The debate will end with you either admitting that your grounds aren't as rational as you thought they were (but sticking to them) or with you going over to the cryonics side.
Assuming continued rule of law, never. Wven though I'd be legally dead for an indeterminate length of time, they'd be in violation of the contract (and could perhaps be sued by my estate or my descendants) if they thaw me for any reason other than to revive me and/or reconstitute my personality and memories in a brain-like substrate.
Not necesserily. There exist vitrification compounds that prevent ice crystals from forming, and instead the water congeals into an ice-like substance. That's why embryos can be frozen solid and revived, as can certain tissues destined for transplant.
Not so. There exist vitrification compounds that prevent ice crystals from forming, and instead the water congeals into an ice-like substance. That's why embryos can be frozen solid and revived, as can certain tissues destined for transplant.
I don't have kids. I'm not contributing to the population problem.
Anyway, I don't see how having a few billion people in underground or orbital cryogenic vaults could make the population problem worse. They're not driving, polluting, or voting idiots into office.
I'm missing something here. What are the ethical problems? It is my belief that my soul is encoded in my pattern of neural connections, and therefore the only way for me to preserve my soul at this time is to preserve my physical brain. In accordance with my belief, I spend my own money on a life insurance policy and name a cryonics company as the beneficiary. Of my own free will I enter into a contract with this cryonics company whereby they agree to place me in suspended animation as soon as possible after I am prounounced dead. Some people want to be cremated, some want to be buried, I want to be frozen. Explain to me the ethical problem here.
Oh, you must mean the ethical problem of society being full of reactionary sanctimonous busy-bodies who think they know what's best for me. I agree, this is a big ethical problem, and thank you for agreeing that they should get off our backs and let us do as we like with our bodies and our estates.
Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans
...or...
...or...
...or (I triple dare you)...
Let's see how it would make Wired sound if we changed the original sentence to apply to some more popular and better armed belief systems:
Long the domain of Christian nut-jobs, cosmologists report that the age of the universe is an overestimate and now believe it to be closer to the Biblical six thousand years.
Long the domain of Muslim nut-jobs, researchers at the Royal Madrassa Institute announced hard evidence that martyrs instantly ascend to heaven.
Long the domain of Mormon nut-jobs, archaeologists have rediscovered the golden plates that Joseph Smith claimed were given to him by the angel Moroni.
Long the domain of Scientology nut-jobs, paleontologists have reported a heretofore undiscovered volcano in Hawaii showing traces of ancient alien visitors.
Would Wired have the balls to print any of the above sentences? I doubt it. Too scared of being boycotted, firebombed, or sued. So are these cowards getting a few cheap laughs at the expense of our beliefs about the soul and life after death because they know there aren't enough of us nut-jobs to fight back? At least our beliefs are slowly coming closer to realization, unlike the anti-scientific belief systems portrayed above. Why are we the nutjobs then?
What, you're into tolerance and respect for other people's beliefs unless you outnumber them by a comfortable margin, is that the true extent of your commitment to civil liberties? Screw you Wired bigots. And the inevitable flood of Slashdot bigots who will think it's fun to bully people who have never done them or anybody else any harm whatsoever.
To clarify: I'm not saying Wired should be sued, bombed, or censored. They have a right to say what they like. Just like I have the right to say they're low-lifes for going out of their way for no particular reason to insult me and other people who share my beliefs.
50*F is 10*C, still not frozen (and who the hell uses Fahrenheit in a medical setting?!). There have been tests with cooled-down mammals including dogs and baboons since the 1950's. I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier.
...a cure for all those boring dullards lacking spontaneity and imagination. They just have a defective version of monoamine oxidase. Do not despair, muggles. We'll save you.