Neat ideas though fundamentally it requires the assumption that organic human minds will continue to offer value into the future. This assumption is almost certainly false, artificial circuitry already vastly outperforms brain tissue in almost every meaningful dimension but scale and power efficiency. (The brain is still significantly larger in scale than the biggest ANNs and needs much less power).
At discrete tasks of course AI software can trivially outperform humans albeit only on a limited subset of tasks so far. But the trend seems pretty clear.
With artificial brains everything you describe above is obviously trivial since a “mind” can just be archived to a VCS until you need it. Or for interstellar journeys you just lower clock speed such that perceptually the journey is a few minutes even if it requires centuries.
I generally agree. It seems unlikely to me that Cryosleep will be developed or in use for very long before brain emulations or AI become dominant. But like you point out, a lot of the benefits listed here would apply to brain emulations too.
Even if it won’t be useful for long, cryonics research seems like an important precursor to Em’s. Developing tools to preserve/image the brain, determining which brain structures are important to preserve, and finding ways to upload organic minds will all be important.
I think the current tech curves suggest it will never be developed before it isn’t needed. The human brain is extremely fragile, complex, and not designed to tolerate freezing. There may simply not be a way to freeze it without installing so much support nanotechnology that the brain is essentially artificial.
While making AI better than humans at task n is mostly an engineering problem, assuming a good definition of what it means to do well at task n is available.
Neat ideas though fundamentally it requires the assumption that organic human minds will continue to offer value into the future. This assumption is almost certainly false, artificial circuitry already vastly outperforms brain tissue in almost every meaningful dimension but scale and power efficiency. (The brain is still significantly larger in scale than the biggest ANNs and needs much less power).
At discrete tasks of course AI software can trivially outperform humans albeit only on a limited subset of tasks so far. But the trend seems pretty clear.
With artificial brains everything you describe above is obviously trivial since a “mind” can just be archived to a VCS until you need it. Or for interstellar journeys you just lower clock speed such that perceptually the journey is a few minutes even if it requires centuries.
I generally agree. It seems unlikely to me that Cryosleep will be developed or in use for very long before brain emulations or AI become dominant. But like you point out, a lot of the benefits listed here would apply to brain emulations too.
Even if it won’t be useful for long, cryonics research seems like an important precursor to Em’s. Developing tools to preserve/image the brain, determining which brain structures are important to preserve, and finding ways to upload organic minds will all be important.
I think the current tech curves suggest it will never be developed before it isn’t needed. The human brain is extremely fragile, complex, and not designed to tolerate freezing. There may simply not be a way to freeze it without installing so much support nanotechnology that the brain is essentially artificial.
While making AI better than humans at task n is mostly an engineering problem, assuming a good definition of what it means to do well at task n is available.