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A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

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Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#51

Post by coldtea »

JesperRavn wrote: post #49
coldtea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and applying Moore's law, it will take about 60 years before we can simulate a brain in real time with a single machine. What Moore's law? This has already stopped.

Re Moore's law, the best answer I could get was from Intel via Wikipedia[0] "our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two." So I wouldn't call that "stopped" but slowed. On the other hand, there are other kinds of advancement that don't really fit into any kind of "law" but might make up for this slowdown, resulting in long term exponential growth, e.g. the transition from CPU to GPU computing. [0] ht…

Intel was slow (delayed) with the Skylake, and poised to get even more delayed in delivering the next series, that jumps to 10nm.

So this "2.5 years" is just the first slowdown -- it gets worse. It's not like we just change 2 to 2.5 and continue for the next 10-20 years.

Probably not even 2 or 3. After 10nm, which is already challenging, you're basically screwed with any kind of process known/used today. And the costs for a fab are into the billions (and get higher with lower sizes), so it's not like small players can even compete in that field.

And that's for multicore -- so unless we also get a way to write more programs to be massively parallel (which lots of algorithms cannot be made) -- we don't get the "free boost" from Moore's law with regards to speed that we used to get.

Not only it's dropped to 2.5 years, but it's also more useless, just giving us more transistors in not readily usable cores.

That's why Intel devotes large part of the CPU to the embedded GPU -- it doesn't have much else to do with it.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#52

Post by ryandvm »

amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

Cryonics is another version of Pascal's Wager.

Logic and reason assures that it almost certainly is not going to work, but the value of the potential upside is effectively infinite to that individual, so it still may be a rational investment.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#53

Post by amalcon »

tene wrote: post #47
amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed! I'm signed up for cryonics through Alcor, and I am not confident at all that there's much chance that I'll be revived post-vitrification. I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. I see it as a low-percentage last-chance life support. It's early and underdeveloped and flawed in m…

This is precisely what I mean when I talk about hope. That value is real, and I don't discount it the way most cryonics non-supporters seem to.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#54

Post by walterbell »

coldtea wrote: post #51
JesperRavn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re Moore's law, the best answer I could get was from Intel via Wikipedia[0] "our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two." So I wouldn't call that "stopped" but slowed. On the other hand, there are other kinds of advancement that don't really fit into any kind of "law" but might make up for this slowdown, resulting in long term exponential growth, e.g. the transition from CPU to GPU computing. [0] ht…

Intel was slow (delayed) with the Skylake, and poised to get even more delayed in delivering the next series, that jumps to 10nm. So this "2.5 years" is just the first slowdown -- it gets worse. It's not like we just change 2 to 2.5 and continue for the next 10-20 years. Probably not even 2 or 3. After 10nm, which is already challenging, you're basically screwed with any kind of process known/used today. And the cost…

Multiple cores are useful for virtualization or any collection of programs which each use one core. If the future is one of many cores, we can invest into software architectures that make it easy for parallel processes/VMs to cooperate securely, e.g. message bus.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#55

Post by eli_gottlieb »

tene wrote: post #47
amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed! I'm signed up for cryonics through Alcor, and I am not confident at all that there's much chance that I'll be revived post-vitrification. I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. I see it as a low-percentage last-chance life support. It's early and underdeveloped and flawed in m…

>I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation.

Except that there are other things you could do with the money, some of which could potentially even give you a much greater chance of not vitrifying in the first place.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#56

Post by analog31 »

amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

... before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses.

A vastly more likely scenario is that the company is a scam in the first place, and has no particular interest in preserving your brain, given the complete lack of any possible accountability mechanism.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#57

Post by 336f5 »

amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

> that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses

You've misunderstood the business structure of modern cryonics. A cryonics org like ALCOR is actually two organizations: one is a commercial organization which charges for storage and for the messy business of cryopreservation, and the second is a nonprofit trust which 'owns' the vitrified brains, pays the rent, conservatively invests the rest, and which will pay for the revival procedures if/when such are invented. When the commercial organization collapses, the nonprofit will simply have to have the dewars transferred somewhere else (it takes something like weeks for those things to boil down to a dangerous level; LN2 dewars are really cool!); and I believe there have already been transferrals of cryopatients in the past.

When you die, your life insurance is paying much of that out into the trust fund. There's not much question of 'whether your estate will be able to afford the procedure', since that's what the trust is for. It's not your estate's business at all.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#58

Post by loup-vaillant »

amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

> You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain

Something is deeply wrong with this way of thinking: it doesn't value human life at all.

Here's another version. Someone comes to you seeking for help. He's dying. He could be saved by some recently devised miraculous medical procedure, which would return him to full health. The catch is, that procedure is relatively expensive (let's say a few weeks worth of your own salary). Question: would you let him die?

Put it this way, of course not. But we tend to forget that cryopreservation, if it works, is exactly the same.

See, a preserved person, provided she can actually be reconstructed back to life, is not actually dead. She's mostly dead. There's a difference. Think of it as a very deep coma. So, if we ever devise a proper reconstruction procedure, we have two choices: (i) pay for the procedure and heal that patient at last; or (ii) don't pay and let the patient drift into utter annihilation.

Heal or don't heal. It's that simple.

---

Now maybe you assume a frozen brain is not a living person. Maybe you're right. Maybe the preservation wasn't good enough on this particular brain. Maybe the preservation procedure was flawed to begin with. Maybe the brain doesn't hold enough information about a person to begin with. Maybe we won't find the technological means to actually get the brain back to its old state —even if it's theoretically possible. Maybe we won't be able to fix whatever caused the brainwaves to go flat in the first place —if that's fixable even in theory, see Alzheimer. I'm sure I've forgotten lots of ways this could go horribly wrong. Anyway, if any of this is true, that frozen brain can't be recovered, does count as dead, and you'd be right to call it a "frozen brain" instead of a "patient".

The thing is, to the best of our current knowledge, the odds are not nil. They're not good, but they're not nil. There is a chance that the brain is actually alive —I mean, in some real deep coma. I'm not talking about some abstract hope here, but some actual probabilities of the kind you have for experimental drugs on cancer patients. Slim, but real.

And of course, if we somehow come up with an actual reconstruction procedure, if we somehow can examine the brain and be assured that yes, a return to full health is not only possible, but highly probable, then we'll know that brain was alive all along. That it was a living person in dire need of healing.

Surely the people of the future would be willing to pay for such healing? If not strangers, maybe (distant) relatives? Some philanthropist? The transhumanist community? Government or mutual funds? Today, people pay good money to give Kim a very slim hope of living again. In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#59

Post by ThomasBombadil »

codecamper wrote: post #17
ThomasBombadil wrote: post #9

Consider the idea that this is a vector into the idea of machines being possibly equally important, or considered even more important than living humans, based on their capacity to accurately represent the continued presence of deceased humans. That a machine is permitted to occupy and consume resources, that might otherwise be used by actual living people who are also trying to live meaningful lives. Which one wins?

no worries. The human emulator uses just 1% of a 2050 EC2 mini compute instance.

So, if the distributed hardware infrastructure cluster supporting 10,000 EC2 mini compute instances is packed with 1,000,000 emulations of humans, how important are the physical data centers that encompass all their backups, master copies and live instances?

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#60

Post by 13thLetter »

eevilspock wrote: post #44

With all the suffering, injustice, unequal opportunity and privilege in the world, this to me is the epitome of narcissism and selfishness. Would you donate to this rather than to social services for, for example, thousands of homeless children in New York City alone?

Why are you spending your time posting on Hacker News when you could be rescuing babies?
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