Nectome requires basically undergoing medically assisted suicide, which is not how I think most people with relatively short AI timelines would expect to die. It’s great to see developments in this space, but other existing cryopreservation technology is (I think) also pretty good.
To say more (copied from my message in a Slack discussion of Nectome and other cryonics providers; while I’d want as many people as possible to actually sign up for some form of cryonics, I consider it a fun/unimportant way of spending time, and this is pretty much unrelated to what I think people should be focusing on for work, namely, preventing humanity’s omnicide by AI):
I think traditional cryonics is obviously worth it. People should really sign up for some form of cryonics.
I think that for someone young and healthy, the mainline non-AI-related way of dying is an accident (e.g., being hit by a car), not a terminal illness.
(Alcor documents what happens, and they’re pretty agentic about getting good outcomes/getting people to be actually preserved. I think the success rate for the relevant reference class is high enough to be obviously worth it.)
This calculator allows for accounting for the life extension tech. The issue is that you might die in an accident before such tech exists; that would be quite annoying.
Pretty separately:
$20k “cumulative discount” is not actually significantly different from paying $100k in 10 years? Possibly worse, depending on how you store the $20k.
I’m fairly disappointed with Nectome’s finances: they’re planning to charge enough to be able to store your body for 100 years. This is, like, bad? A fair amount of good futures is we pause AI for a long while, and don’t get huge amounts of compute. People preserved by Nectome would, approximately, only be able to be revived with a lot of compute (by being scanned; see Alcor’s 2016 statement above). If this doesn’t happen for 100 years, and Nectome runs out of money they charged you to store you for 100 years, they either throw you out, or start a Ponzi scheme with a pyramid of bodies, which is not quite a situation one would want to be in. Long-term stability is one of the most important factors of picking a cryonics provider; Nectome, so far, has approximately zero.
Alcor very much plans its finances to be able to store people indefinitely; and also to raise/have enough money to be able to build a facility outside the US and to be able to move the bodies there if the situation in the US worsens sufficiently. They’re not claiming they’ll definitely be able to store you indefinitely, but they act basically with the seriousness required.
To be clear, our price for a preservation accounts for an endowment that can store people indefinitely (100x yearly costs is just an easy way of calculating that) + a revival budget. I also think we have much better options than throwing people out even in a disaster scenario, which we get into in this post.
In terms of erasing information: I agree that destroying information is theoretically impossible. In a degenerate case, even cremation doesn’t truly destroy any information. The key question is how difficult the information is to retrieve, and in many traditional cryonics cases, I think the answer is “incredibly difficult, even for superhuman AI.”
You’re obviously correct that most young healthy people don’t die in MAiD-compatible ways. We’re also planning a post on why we think preservation should be interesting to people with short AI timelines, but if nothing else, many of us have parents and grandparents whose risk profile looks different from our own. This is one reason we’ve set up our preservations to be transferable: most people IME don’t want to buy for themselves, they want to buy for someone they love.
Nectome requires basically undergoing medically assisted suicide, which is not how I think most people with relatively short AI timelines would expect to die. It’s great to see developments in this space, but other existing cryopreservation technology is (I think) also pretty good.
To say more (copied from my message in a Slack discussion of Nectome and other cryonics providers; while I’d want as many people as possible to actually sign up for some form of cryonics, I consider it a fun/unimportant way of spending time, and this is pretty much unrelated to what I think people should be focusing on for work, namely, preventing humanity’s omnicide by AI):
I think both ice crystal damage (to the extent it occurs with Alcor’s preservation) and the dehydration problems don’t really impact the preservation of the information / the connectome. See, e.g., Alcor’s statement on the core of technique (and why they’re not planning to use it) from back in 2016: https://www.alcor.org/resources/blog/alcor-position-statement-on-brain-preservation-foundation-prize/. It is, like, incredibly hard to erase information; dehydration obviously doesn’t lead to the irreversible erasure of information.
I think traditional cryonics is obviously worth it. People should really sign up for some form of cryonics.
I think that for someone young and healthy, the mainline non-AI-related way of dying is an accident (e.g., being hit by a car), not a terminal illness.
(Alcor documents what happens, and they’re pretty agentic about getting good outcomes/getting people to be actually preserved. I think the success rate for the relevant reference class is high enough to be obviously worth it.)
This calculator allows for accounting for the life extension tech. The issue is that you might die in an accident before such tech exists; that would be quite annoying.
Pretty separately:
$20k “cumulative discount” is not actually significantly different from paying $100k in 10 years? Possibly worse, depending on how you store the $20k.
I’m fairly disappointed with Nectome’s finances: they’re planning to charge enough to be able to store your body for 100 years. This is, like, bad? A fair amount of good futures is we pause AI for a long while, and don’t get huge amounts of compute. People preserved by Nectome would, approximately, only be able to be revived with a lot of compute (by being scanned; see Alcor’s 2016 statement above). If this doesn’t happen for 100 years, and Nectome runs out of money they charged you to store you for 100 years, they either throw you out, or start a Ponzi scheme with a pyramid of bodies, which is not quite a situation one would want to be in. Long-term stability is one of the most important factors of picking a cryonics provider; Nectome, so far, has approximately zero.
Alcor very much plans its finances to be able to store people indefinitely; and also to raise/have enough money to be able to build a facility outside the US and to be able to move the bodies there if the situation in the US worsens sufficiently. They’re not claiming they’ll definitely be able to store you indefinitely, but they act basically with the seriousness required.
To be clear, our price for a preservation accounts for an endowment that can store people indefinitely (100x yearly costs is just an easy way of calculating that) + a revival budget. I also think we have much better options than throwing people out even in a disaster scenario, which we get into in this post.
In terms of erasing information: I agree that destroying information is theoretically impossible. In a degenerate case, even cremation doesn’t truly destroy any information. The key question is how difficult the information is to retrieve, and in many traditional cryonics cases, I think the answer is “incredibly difficult, even for superhuman AI.”
You’re obviously correct that most young healthy people don’t die in MAiD-compatible ways. We’re also planning a post on why we think preservation should be interesting to people with short AI timelines, but if nothing else, many of us have parents and grandparents whose risk profile looks different from our own. This is one reason we’ve set up our preservations to be transferable: most people IME don’t want to buy for themselves, they want to buy for someone they love.