I have not seen discussion of S risks related to this subject, which I think is a huge omission, even if only from a utiltarian perspective.
If there is even a 2% chance that a misaligned AI / autocratic government will utilize preservation and life extension technology (of any kind, including mind uploading, if possible) to make one suffer hellishly for a billion years, how does this change the picture? Should one prefer death? Should one make sure their brain connectome is disintegrated after death just to make sure? Or go forward with it?
The overwhelmingly likely outcome is that Nectome fails, even just on priors because 90% of startups fail.
Hence one is going to be just as dead as everyone else, but with less money spent on happiness for oneself or others.
So the remaining question is on the margins: Conditional on one actually eventually being resurrected/uploaded, what are the probabilities of this going well vs resulting in lots of suffering for oneself? Looking at the trajectory for where the world is currently headed, I find it hard to see why a positive outcome should be more likely than a very negative one.
Leaving qntm’s story “Lena” here as an intuition pump.
In conclusion, I see this as negative expected value. Most likely the money is just plain lost, and if it is not, things are likely going to be worse than just being plain dead.
I have not seen discussion of S risks related to this subject, which I think is a huge omission, even if only from a utiltarian perspective.
If there is even a 2% chance that a misaligned AI / autocratic government will utilize preservation and life extension technology (of any kind, including mind uploading, if possible) to make one suffer hellishly for a billion years, how does this change the picture? Should one prefer death? Should one make sure their brain connectome is disintegrated after death just to make sure? Or go forward with it?
Strong Agreement.
The overwhelmingly likely outcome is that Nectome fails, even just on priors because 90% of startups fail. Hence one is going to be just as dead as everyone else, but with less money spent on happiness for oneself or others.
So the remaining question is on the margins: Conditional on one actually eventually being resurrected/uploaded, what are the probabilities of this going well vs resulting in lots of suffering for oneself? Looking at the trajectory for where the world is currently headed, I find it hard to see why a positive outcome should be more likely than a very negative one. Leaving qntm’s story “Lena” here as an intuition pump.
In conclusion, I see this as negative expected value. Most likely the money is just plain lost, and if it is not, things are likely going to be worse than just being plain dead.