(some messages i sent to a friend at coefficient giving 6 months ago, with a few edits)
maybe openphil global health and wellbeing should fund some cryonics evangelists and scalers
assuming developing advanced AI goes well for humanity (which openphil effectively seems to have a decently high probability on) or we ban AI and also don’t destroy humanity/capitalism/institutions, you are likely buying > billions of QALYs for each actual current human who would have died that gets cryopreserved. (edit: hmm i guess this is assuming recovery from the outputs of a human is fucked. if you can recover someone from their writing as well then maybe there’s not much to gain from being cryofrozen. not sure what i think about this.) i think currently the usual price per person is like 100k usd but i think it could be like 10k with worse methods that are probably just fine, and at massive scale it could be like 1k — if very widespread, cryonics could plausibly even be cheaper than other usual things people do with a body
i mean it’s unclear if these cost numbers are really directly relevant in the naive way. like, you wouldn’t compare these to bednet usd/QALY numbers, because openphil wouldn’t be paying for these individuals getting cryonics probably. tho idk, i guess openphil could be initially paying for some fixed costs of setting things up which could be well estimated per person by these numbers maybe. well, openphil could just also be paying for individual people lol. anyway, my guess is that the correct calculus will make the bet look much better than just paying for each cryopreservation
(some messages i sent to a friend at coefficient giving 6 months ago, with a few edits)
maybe openphil global health and wellbeing should fund some cryonics evangelists and scalers
assuming developing advanced AI goes well for humanity (which openphil effectively seems to have a decently high probability on) or we ban AI and also don’t destroy humanity/capitalism/institutions, you are likely buying > billions of QALYs for each actual current human who would have died that gets cryopreserved. (edit: hmm i guess this is assuming recovery from the outputs of a human is fucked. if you can recover someone from their writing as well then maybe there’s not much to gain from being cryofrozen. not sure what i think about this.) i think currently the usual price per person is like 100k usd but i think it could be like 10k with worse methods that are probably just fine, and at massive scale it could be like 1k — if very widespread, cryonics could plausibly even be cheaper than other usual things people do with a body
i mean it’s unclear if these cost numbers are really directly relevant in the naive way. like, you wouldn’t compare these to bednet usd/QALY numbers, because openphil wouldn’t be paying for these individuals getting cryonics probably. tho idk, i guess openphil could be initially paying for some fixed costs of setting things up which could be well estimated per person by these numbers maybe. well, openphil could just also be paying for individual people lol. anyway, my guess is that the correct calculus will make the bet look much better than just paying for each cryopreservation