If you believe that technology is going to get vastly better before you’re in serious danger of death, you don’t need cryonics. If you believe that technology isn’t going to get vastly better at all, or at least not for hundreds of years, you probably shouldn’t bother with cryonics. There’s a region in the middle where it looks much more appealing: you expect huge progress, but fear that it’ll happen after your death.
One outside-view reason for adjusting one’s optimism about cryonics downwards would be that predictions of Big Dramatic Changes on a timescale of, say, a few decades, are very common and almost always wrong. AI and fusion power have been about 50 years away for at least 50 years. (Cheap space travel, too?) Looking outside the domain of science, this is also a common timescale for end-of-the-world cults.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that everyone who thinks cryonics worth while is overestimating the probability of huge technological progress in the 30-to-300-year range, nor that cryonics is not in fact worth while.)
If you believe that technology is going to get vastly better before you’re in serious danger of death, you don’t need cryonics. If you believe that technology isn’t going to get vastly better at all, or at least not for hundreds of years, you probably shouldn’t bother with cryonics. There’s a region in the middle where it looks much more appealing: you expect huge progress, but fear that it’ll happen after your death.
One outside-view reason for adjusting one’s optimism about cryonics downwards would be that predictions of Big Dramatic Changes on a timescale of, say, a few decades, are very common and almost always wrong. AI and fusion power have been about 50 years away for at least 50 years. (Cheap space travel, too?) Looking outside the domain of science, this is also a common timescale for end-of-the-world cults.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that everyone who thinks cryonics worth while is overestimating the probability of huge technological progress in the 30-to-300-year range, nor that cryonics is not in fact worth while.)