If money were no obstacle and you were dying, what do you think about using cryogenics to try to extend your life and hopefully be cured by future people?
Option 2 (Only if reversible) refers to it being contingent on new cryosleep technology being developed, similar to that in sci-fi, where it is routine to freeze and revive healthy humans for long space travel. This ensures that you can be revived, and you'll probably be put into cryosleep before official death.
poll answer
@urusan
I don't trust social progress to be constantly be upwards to arbitrary points in the future, so I agree to it only if:
(a) I'm promised complete autonomy when I'm revived,
and since promises can be broken and mean nothing,
(b) multiple internal kill switches, with different mechanisms, that I could use to kill myself post-revival if I so choose - just in case the future society is bad enough to warrant that. The switches could also be nullified by future technology, but corrupted societies are often also inept, so I'd be betting on the probability that at least one of the kill switches survives their attempts to mess with them.
@wizzwizz4 @digital_carver I agree that they would just edit out the kill switches.
Interestingly, this strategy wouldn't be totally futile if the process were reversible. If waking you up was as easy as telling the cryopod to wake you up, then even a less technologically advanced society could wake you up.
Of course, unless they have the tech to cure you, you'd just die right away anyway. After all, you didn't freeze yourself for the funsies.
@wizzwizz4 @digital_carver I do also think that the various people worried about waking up in a worse situation are not totally off base here.
I'd estimate you have maybe a 50% chance of not waking up, a 49% chance of waking up in a nicer situation, and a 1% chance of waking up in a worse situation. It's not that we're more likely to be headed towards a utopia, but that dystopian situations probably won't care and just discard the frozen bodies.
@wizzwizz4 @digital_carver The most likely bad scenarios (that don't involve immediate death anyway):
* A superintelligent AI has taken over things and is doing awful things to humanity, it wakes you up to join in
* You are sold to an ultra wealthy owner, who fixes you but uses your legally dead status to enslave you
* Similarly, you wake up to find yourself owned by a nobody, since nobody cared
While a classic dystopian society might wake you up, you aren't very valuable to them
@wizzwizz4 @digital_carver That said, we all have to remember that even if society has gone off the rails (at least from our perspective) by the time we wake up, the technology level involved will probably give a huge boost to the livability of the future.
Who cares if things are a mess if they have a holodeck? Or soma? Or replicators?
Even without access to these things, life might be more comfortable than today even in what's effectively their prisons.
@wizzwizz4 @digital_carver You wake up to find yourself in future prison. Your cell is about the size of a typical apartment in NYC, but much quieter. Your cellmate is extremely polite and docile due to the society he grew up in, he's in here for thinking poorly about the leader
A terrible pandemic is ripping through the prison population at this time...but nobody actually dies because of the medical care, so really you could just get sick for a few days
You get holodeck access weekly
@wizzwizz4 @digital_carver One day, while eating lunch, the meanest prisoner in the prison come up to you and demands you move aside for him. Things escalate, and you end up punching him. He immediately collapses and howls like he's dying. The guards come up to you and touch you with their (totally painless) stun sticks
You wake up in virtual solitary confinement, which turns out to just be a more boring version of the holodeck. You spend your short time there reading from a virtual library
@digital_carver @urusan None of the kill switches would survive unless they wanted them to. This is “we can fix tissue damage to each individual cell” tech levels; they'd just take the kill switches out, if they had any reason to look for them.
Then again, it's unlikely a dystopian future society would bother reviving the human popsicles.