Lol the future they dream of won't ever happen and it's a direct consequence of them hoarding wealth
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
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It is our duty as poors to assist our betters in this endeavour to the best of our ability and get absolutely as many billionaires as possible (a) freezing their heads (b) locking up their wealth so tightly that nobody else can access it
Even if no one can use the wealth, wouldn't it be placed in some kind of trust in order to keep accruing wealth rather than be decimated by inflation?
And then, as the frozen rich wouldn't use any of their wealth, it would just keep accruing wealth. They would be perfect, frozen, capitalists. The control of that wealth would give power, and controllers of the trusts can gain even wealth and thus power more by coordinating. The power would only keep growing as more rich freeze themselves to keep up with and join the growing trust of trusts.
Living in a society where the frozen owners would own all the means of production, these frozen owners would naturally be hailed as sleeping kings in order to motivate me system. They may even be seen as something godlike.
Then one day, if one wakes up, it would cause immediate power struggles, as well as give a flash point for the discontent of the billions of impoverished serfs slaving away for the controllers. But the controllers would mobilise violence, and....
Oh, HG Wells already wrote this story. Typical!
I wonder if anyone has worked out an economic model that treats this kind of lockup as though the money had been just literally lit on fire. Be interesting to see what that does to the money supply and whether it could help discredit the monetarist position on inflation.
I think we are missing the point here.
As a poor, this just informs me to create a cryo company and find a .1%er to "fund" my research. Which create your own UBI.
The company survives off the wealth of the frozen guy and I would survive off the company. And now I can just say ai assisted bam instant retirement
Obligatory /s
No no. Actually that is the dream. The real question is how many people can you support from that?
Sounds like I just found my COO
I’d be proud to🫡
Freeze all the rich, then unplug the freezers. Life would improve for 99% of the people in the world.
If their wealth is redistributed, yes. Inherited? Same issue.
Some EAs have tried to make an "EA case" for cryonics, and I just want someone to comment on it: "But couldn't you safe many more people by using that money to buy malaria bednets, or vaccines, or almost anything else?"
But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.
The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again — stuck to the capsule like a child’s tongue to a cold lamp post.
Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
A nice read about what can happen while someone has been frozen in hope to be revived in the future.
They MOVED? Like, independently?? Or they kinda slipped & slid all gushy as they thawed out?
I read this story some time ago. As far as I can recall, the cooling process was interrupted. The bodies then thawed and began to move. Then they re-froze again. Upon a later inspection it was discovered that the bodies have moved and also were severely damaged. Read the story, it‘s quite entertaining.
The interesting thing about this is that these people never stop to think that the future they dream off might never happen. Aside from the fact that their cryo company might just go under, they don’t ever consider that in 200 years they might just wake up under a dystopia.
At one time I was going out with someone who was into Max More, without either of us being cogniscant of the rationalist link back then, and she gave me the infuriating justification that it was all a probabilities game with a bizarre political economy in the background. The thinking goes that if your society becomes a dystopia, there’s no reason and/or no resources to wake you up. Looking back, it’s amazing to see it as a combination of that characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination and Promethean ideology.
For anybody hard of hearing at the back, the combination of a “characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination” and a “Promethean ideology” is subtext for “striding confidently towards fascism”
I mean, I have no issues if they go into a blender, operate for a few 10 minutes or so, and then freeze. Imagine the savings.
Moon pie, what a time to be alive.
It's not too expensive to actually undergo cryonics, so it's a nice little insurance policy.
Definitely die or maybe die, if you have an extra 30k it seems worth it.
You might as well set fire to 30K. Some of these "trusted companies" expect you to have like 500K avail.
I only know about alcor and the cryonics institute, they both charge around 30k. No financial limits. CI does whole body for that price, alcor only does the head as far as I know.
I wouldn't recommend signing up with an unproven up-and-comer.
It's a good insurance policy: definitely dying versus maybe dying.
alcor
Lol, liquid nitrogen. They're dead dead dead.
Not really.
Suspended, more like.
Cryonics is a pretty common natural phenomenon, and it isn't like technology as a field is stagnant.
I don't see any technical or scientific prohibition against further cryonics development.
Aren't they all unproven, though?
Sure, paying Alcor $30k to keep your body frozen indefinitely is probably a better use of your money than, say, paying your neighbor to do it in his garage freezer, but they have virtually the same expertise in getting you ambulatory again.
The suspension part, the cryonics itself, is proven simple science, biomimicry of a natural phenomenon.
It's the reanimation process of complex neutral tissue that hasn't been fully worked out yet, but it's not like there's been zero progress or research into the process.
I can't see a reason not to expect we'll figure it out.
I don't know about your neighbors, but mine don't have any life extension or cryonics scientists working with them specifically on developing reanimation processes.
I think places like the cryonics institute specifically are doing pretty well at developing reanimation processes.
Okay, but I don't think people are skeptical about the possibility of freezing people. The resurrection part and the (un)likelihood of a company lasting the centuries this might take are the parts that are a tougher sell.
Like, I don't really object in principle to someone basically running a Kickstarter for immortality, but the track record of delivery is pretty dire, no? The number of early cryonics businesses/orgs that went bankrupt (and what happened to their clients) definitely does not inspire confidence.
Not at all dire, to my understanding.
Any arguments I hear against the reanimation process of cryonics sound like critics of computers or the internet
Or like teachers 30 years ago asking facetiously "are you going to carry around a calculator in your pocket your whole life?"
Before a technology is viable, it seems impossible and impractical.
After the technology is proven, everyone knew it was coming and they pretended it made intuitive sense all along.
With a process as simple as this one, which is basically just finding the right solution with which to safely lower the temperature of human tissue and then safely raise the temperature of human tissue, I really don't see some technological or physiological hurdle that can't be overcome what scientific perseverance.
We know insects, frogs and fish cryonically rest and reanimate regularly, we know larger animals and even humans can get frozen to "death" and then come back to life later, we just have to figure out exactly how to control the process so as to minimize damage.
Nothing about that is impossible or unreasonable to expect.
As for the companies failing, that's just standard corporate startup.
Netscape isn't around anymore, Google is.
Maybe alcor goes by the wayside and ReVi standardizes the process.
I don't know which company is going to do it, but I'm confident some company or institute is going to succeed.
Going back to my original question whether a company is proven or not, have any of the companies freezing pets brought them back successfully? It doesn't have to be a German shepherd or anything big like that--something small like a rabbit will do.
Call me a stickler, but I do think it's important to have completed at least one successful run to call a process "proven."
You don't consider the cryonic process of freezing and reanimating insects, amphibians and fish established?
Even though they literally freeze and then come back to life?
No large animals that have been cryonically frozen have been whole-body reanimated as far as I know, they're focusing on reanimating whole organs and specifically brains first.
A group called 21st century medicine froze and brought back a rabbit brain with " the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures all intact* back in 2016.
If the process is freezing and then reviving a dead human, then no. The (interesting, valuable) research on living fish, rabbit brains, and invertebrates is not that, and quite different from the product companies are asking tens of thousands of dollars for.
I also think it's important not to conflate suspended-animation-type cryonics that involve freezing and reviving a living creature with what this is originally about, i.e., freezing a dead creature to preserve it for resurrection using unspecified, hypothetical technology. As far as I'm aware, all cryonics companies freeze people upon death, and none are freezing living humans.
Why do you think the process is different?
It's literally lowering the temperature of different tissues and then raising the temperature of those tissues while keeping the structures intact.
It's the same process.
Brain death doesn't immediately occur upon the declaration of medical death, so they have several minutes to lower the temperature into a state of suspended animation, which is the same process that natural organisms regularly participate in.
It all depends on how you understand death.
Humans seem to think death is the same across the board and immutable.
But people's hearts stop and you can give them an adrenaline shot to bring them back to life.
People stop breathing and you can open up a vent straight into their lungs.
Coma.patients spontaneously reanimate.
After the heart stops and someone has declared dead, you have 3 to 4 minutes of brain structures still being viable.
That isn't magic, each case is physiological process that is not yet understood as well as it could be.
Like shocking a heart to stop arrhythmia used to be misunderstood as "nothing to be done, the heart is broken".
Raising the temperature of tissue after lowering The temperature and preserving tissue structure is a technical physiological hurdle that regularly occurs in nature.
Cryonic institutes and organizations want to bring that process to larger mammals and humans.