Science fiction has a bias towards things going wrong.
In the particular case of cryonics, if there’s a dystopian future where the majority of people have few or no rights, it’s a disaster all around, but as ata says, you can presumably commit suicide. There’s a chance that even that will be unfeasible—for example if brains are used, while conscious, for their processing power. This doesn’t seem likely, but I don’t know how to evaluate it in detail.
The other case—people in general have rights, but thawed people, or thawed people from before a certain point in time, do not—requires that thawed people do not have a constituency. This doesn’t seem terribly likely, though as I recall, Niven has it that it takes a very long time for thawing to be developed.
Normally, I would expect for there to be commercial and legal pressures for thawed people to be treated decently. (I’ve never seen an sf story in which thawed people are a political football, but it’s an interesting premise.)
I think the trend is towards better futures (including richer, with less reason to enslave people), but there’s no guarantee. I think it’s much more likely that frozen people won’t be revived than that they’ll be revived into a bad situation.
Science fiction has a bias towards things going wrong.
All fiction has a bias towards things going wrong. Need some kind of conflict.
(Reality also has a bias towards things going wrong, but if Fun Theory is correct, then unlike with fiction, we can change that condition without reducing the demand for reality.)
Science fiction has a bias towards things going wrong.
In the particular case of cryonics, if there’s a dystopian future where the majority of people have few or no rights, it’s a disaster all around, but as ata says, you can presumably commit suicide. There’s a chance that even that will be unfeasible—for example if brains are used, while conscious, for their processing power. This doesn’t seem likely, but I don’t know how to evaluate it in detail.
The other case—people in general have rights, but thawed people, or thawed people from before a certain point in time, do not—requires that thawed people do not have a constituency. This doesn’t seem terribly likely, though as I recall, Niven has it that it takes a very long time for thawing to be developed.
Normally, I would expect for there to be commercial and legal pressures for thawed people to be treated decently. (I’ve never seen an sf story in which thawed people are a political football, but it’s an interesting premise.)
I think the trend is towards better futures (including richer, with less reason to enslave people), but there’s no guarantee. I think it’s much more likely that frozen people won’t be revived than that they’ll be revived into a bad situation.
All fiction has a bias towards things going wrong. Need some kind of conflict.
(Reality also has a bias towards things going wrong, but if Fun Theory is correct, then unlike with fiction, we can change that condition without reducing the demand for reality.)
Science fiction has a stronger bias towards things going wrong on a grand scale than most fiction does.
Otherwise, the advanced technology would just make everything great. They need extra-conflict to counter-out.