The alternatives to not waking people up, if the technology exists to do so, are to either keep them frozen or let them die. At some point in time the former is probably going to cost more than revival. We can’t discount the possibility that they will just let everyone who’s not interesting die, but that would be a strange future indeed, and not one that I personally would like to be revived in.
We can’t discount the possibility that they will just let everyone who’s not interesting die, but that would be a strange future indeed, and not one that I personally would like to be revived in.
I doubt “interesting” will be the metric, but is that substantially worse than our current scenario, where we let people die as a result of them having insufficient funds to direct resources towards themselves even when said resources are in fact available?
Well, I’d chalk up today’s lack of enthusiam towards cryonics as more ignorance than anything else. You do have a point though; we do not seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping people from dying. If anything, we seem to embrace it.
Cryonics is also an instance of this, but I actually had more vanilla sorts of altruism in mind when I wrote the comment, such as medical care, clean water, mosquito nets...the resources to prevent premature death exist, I don’t think ignorance is really an issue, and the average citizen even agrees that we aught to do more, and no one really embraces pre-mature death...and yet it doesn’t always happen, largely because of the idiosyncrasies of our resource allocation system.
So my meaning is, in the future, if some frozen corpses fall through the cracks of the future resource allocation system, I wouldn’t consider that as evidence that this future is inferior to the present, nor would I consider it a strange future with alien values. Our present age allows people to fall through the cracks in much more egregious ways.
The alternatives to not waking people up, if the technology exists to do so, are to either keep them frozen or let them die. At some point in time the former is probably going to cost more than revival. We can’t discount the possibility that they will just let everyone who’s not interesting die, but that would be a strange future indeed, and not one that I personally would like to be revived in.
I doubt “interesting” will be the metric, but is that substantially worse than our current scenario, where we let people die as a result of them having insufficient funds to direct resources towards themselves even when said resources are in fact available?
Well, I’d chalk up today’s lack of enthusiam towards cryonics as more ignorance than anything else. You do have a point though; we do not seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping people from dying. If anything, we seem to embrace it.
Cryonics is also an instance of this, but I actually had more vanilla sorts of altruism in mind when I wrote the comment, such as medical care, clean water, mosquito nets...the resources to prevent premature death exist, I don’t think ignorance is really an issue, and the average citizen even agrees that we aught to do more, and no one really embraces pre-mature death...and yet it doesn’t always happen, largely because of the idiosyncrasies of our resource allocation system.
So my meaning is, in the future, if some frozen corpses fall through the cracks of the future resource allocation system, I wouldn’t consider that as evidence that this future is inferior to the present, nor would I consider it a strange future with alien values. Our present age allows people to fall through the cracks in much more egregious ways.