A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by selimthegrim » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

amalcon wrote: post #67

loup-vaillant wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

False dichotomy. I don't need to place a zero value on human life to disagree with this reasoning. I only need to place a finite value on it. Obviously our society only places a finite value on human life (e.g. because people sometimes starve to death, or die for lack of medical care). Edit: > In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health? This one . People die of tot…

Thank you for illustrating in one fell swoop how disconnected the transhumanists are.

Even Greg Egan took a whole short story to do it.

http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/

“You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle’.”

edit: and when I scroll down I see I've been beaten to the Greg Egan punch. Great minds, I suppose...

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

#72

Post by JesperRavn » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

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…

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

I don't quite understand your point here, but if you were intending to refute my point regarding GPU computing, I think you are not understanding the nature of the CPU to GPU shift. GPGPU computing is a way to increase effective computing power without advancements in semiconductor technology. GPUs have a fundamentally different architecture that allows them to get much more processing power from the same silicon. They work differently to CPUs (amortizing memory access latency across many hardware threads instead of trying to minimize it, sharing control flow across many cores to minimize that cost, and requiring manual control of memory locality) but on many domains including training neural networks, they are much more powerful.

So GPUs are certainly not a diversion CPU makers get into when they can't make progress on CPUs.

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

#73

Post by cbr » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 9:58 PM UTC

336f5 wrote: post #57

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…

"that your estate will be able to afford the procedure" reads to me as being about revival? Which ALCOR etc don't attempt to cover.

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

#74

Post by cbr » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 10:03 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #58

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 e…

"In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?"

This one.

People are dying now because of diseases we have basically eradicated in rich countries. The choice you're talking about making, saving a life for a few weeks worth of your own salary, is one that is already available to you and many others. What are you doing about it?

Now, I think you're right that it's horribly wrong to be letting people die when it's so easily avoidable, and I donate half my salary to help make things better, but most people don't think this way--most people just spend their money on themselves. Which means that if you're relying on the generosity of others to revive you you're probably going to be out of luck.

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

#75

Post by edanm » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 10:07 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #56

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.

That's a little pessimistic, and doesn't sound right to me.

There aren't that many companies in cryonics, but they've been around for a long time (30 years I think?). And there are things you can do to verify - e.g. visit their preservation rooms, etc. And people have done this.

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

#76

Post by coldtea » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 10:17 PM UTC

JesperRavn wrote: post #72

coldtea wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's why Intel devotes large part of the CPU to the embedded GPU -- it doesn't have much else to do with it. I don't quite understand your point here, but if you were intending to refute my point regarding GPU computing, I think you are not understanding the nature of the CPU to GPU shift. GPGPU computing is a way to increase effective computing power without advancements in semiconductor technology. GPUs have a fu…

>I think you are not understanding the nature of the CPU to GPU shift.

I do. It's just not a general way to bypass the Moore law slowdown because there are domains that are inherently non parallelizable, and there GPUs don't do much.

Besides, I'll already covered GPUs in a sense when I talked about the need to make software to work well in many cores. Part of the work for that translates to GPU computing too.

But there's no general "shift" from CPU to GPU computing, as in "here's a new paradigm that will solve the Moore slowdown". It's, and will remain, more of a special purpose thing, for graphics, rendering, number crunching and yes, neural networks.

>So GPUs are certainly not a diversion CPU makers get into when they can't make progress on CPUs.

GPUs in general might not be, but for integrated CPUs and especially those from Intel, they are.

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

#77

Post by 336f5 » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

hugh4 wrote: post #66

336f5 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nonprofit can also collapse, though. Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.

> Is it likely to happen?

It's hard to estimate, but nonprofits in the West have OK long-term track records and the cryonics double-organization model has worked well since it was created in the aftermath of Chatsworth (which demonstrated why the commercial side must be separated). Arguably, it only needs to work for another century, and it's not like it's that hard to keep some funds conservatively invested, pay rent regularly, and react once every few decades to a problem.

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

#78

Post by 336f5 » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 10:27 PM UTC

cbr wrote: post #73

336f5 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"that your estate will be able to afford the procedure" reads to me as being about revival? Which ALCOR etc don't attempt to cover.

> Which ALCOR etc don't attempt to cover.

Maybe you should reread my comment.

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

#79

Post by ck2 » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 10:30 PM UTC

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…

Now factor in the sheer population of the earth by the time science reaches such an implausible point and realize how little one life matters to anyone living or remotely "in charge".

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

#80

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Sep 12, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #75

analog31 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

That's a little pessimistic, and doesn't sound right to me. There aren't that many companies in cryonics, but they've been around for a long time (30 years I think?). And there are things you can do to verify - e.g. visit their preservation rooms, etc. And people have done this.

The pessimists are hard to tell from the realists in this particular case.