X-Message-Number: 5965 Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 20:28:19 -0500 From: <> (Jeffrey Soreff) Subject: Will life be worthwhile if cryonics succeeds? Mark Muhlestein wrote: >So, if you are alive on March 16, 2096, it is likely that you will >*want* to be alive. Given that you would want to be alive then, it is >not absurd to conclude that you would also want to be alive if you had >just been revived. It would take some time to catch up to where you >would be had you not been frozen, but in the long term I see no good >reason why you would be inherently at a disadvantage. Unless those >reviving you were malevolent, you could be given the opportunity to >take advantage of all the fruits of the past 100 years learning and >technological development. Your particular set of skills, experiences, >knowledge, and so on will be one more valuable starting point in the >sparse, virtually infinite multidimensional space of possible beings. >To me, this answers Jeff Soreff's worry that AI's and uploads will make >biological humans uninteresting. Yes, it may well be that the >limitations of our biology would be somewhat confining in such a world, >but that same biological human makes a fine starting point for a more >ambitious entity who was willing to undergo a (probably gradual) >process of self-transformation. We can only speculate about what life >would (will?) be like in such a world, but since *we are the ones who >will be creating it* we have a chance to steer things in the directions >we want. That is one reason why I have hope for us hominids. I guess I expressed my original concern unclearly. The scenario that concerns me is one where cryonics does NOT succeed. The problem isn't that biological humans become uninteresting in the sense that the important action moves elsewhere. The problem is that AI's and uploads might compete down the effective economic value of what a human can do to roughly the replication and maintenance cost of an upload. If I recall correctly, the raw power needed to maintain computation equivalent to a human brain is around a milliwatt (using Moravec's 10 teraops/brain, and Drexler's 100 nanowatts/gigaop). Human metabolism requires on the order of 100 watts, 5 orders of magnitude more. This sort of competition could easily kill off the humans who are alive, and in a position to try and defend themselves at the time that it happens. This is basically a scenario where humans lose control of their machines (either AIs, or uploads that have modified themselves and/or each other). -Jeffrey Soreff standard disclaimer: I do not speak for my employer. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5965