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Dying is concerning. Like other panicked easy marks, I'm signed up for cryonics. Although I think it's very unlikely to work - call it a 1% chance - it still beats the baseline.
I engage in moderately risky activities and if my death occurs in the next 5-ish years it will almost certainly be due to an accident. Most scenarios kill or incapacitate me from meaningful decision making outright. Some don't, however, and it's possible that I could be mortally injured while retaining my basic decision making abilities.
Assuming that I find myself in one of these's rare scenarios, let's say I'm offered a choice. Without emergency treatment I will die. This treatment has an around 20% chance of causing significant additional damage to my brain. Damage that could not be undone even under best sci-fi medical advancements should the cryonics process work. Even with the treatment I have suffered irrevocable damage and it's unknown if it may be progressive.
My instinct is to request that doctors treat me as if I had died in the accident and begin the cryonics process in as controlled and ideal fashion as possible. I know that in practice that's a request that's unlikely to be granted, I'm just not sure if it would be the right choice.
Would you make the same decision? Should anyone be allowed to make that kind of trade-off with the assistance of medical staff?
I am interested in cryonics, but I'd be lying if I said it was more than an academic curiosity to me, despite my strong transhumanist and anti-dying bent.
Firstly, and most importantly, I am young and in good health. The kinds of things that could kill me are more like being run over a bus than a drawn-out chronic disease where there's room to make such arrangements.
Second, perhaps I was mistaken before, since this really is important, we might be facing a real, no bullshit technological Singularity. LLMs are shockingly smart, and while I'm not interested in litigating the definition of "AGI", they are clearly both Artificial and meaningfully Intelligent. They also offer a potential road to true superintelligence, which I am reliably told can solve most of the world's problems. When it comes to cryonics, we might genuinely be able to overcome all but true information-theoretical death.
I am more concerned, at present, by the risk of automation-induced unemployment or my p(doom) of roughly 20% than I am about dying for other reasons. I need my money for the potential headache of ending up unemployed or unemployable. If $10m fell into my lap, I would certainly sign up with Alcor or another provider, but right now, it's simply not pressing.
Yes, and a "why not?"
Its so fun reasoning about the future under the uncertainty posed when the emergence of superintelligence seems likely in the next 10 years. At least, that's how the powers that be are behaving. Either we spin off into technological utopia or we all die very quickly and irretrievably. Although technological utopia seems likely to also entail 'reviving the mostly dead' so there's still some alpha in cryo, I think.
I'm in the similar situation in that I'm 'young' and healthy (starting to get grey hairs, though) and so I'm exceedingly likely to survive into the next 10 years under current assumptions.
If I were to make a list of things with the highest chance of killing me in the next 10 years I'd guess "car accident" and "random act of criminal violence" are probably in the top 3. Slipping in the bathroom or drowning at the beach are honorable mentions.
So, I'd argue, the simplest intervention to make is just spend less time on the roads. And I've already arranged my life so that 90% of everything I do is located inside a 10 mile radius, almost entirely on roads with <55 mph speed limits. And you'll probably never catch me on a motorcycle. Seems like full time work from home is the ultimate hack, there.
Likewise, I live in a low-crime area of an already low-crime state where the police generally take crime prevention seriously. And I am not in any social groups that would cause me to be hanging with violent criminal types.
So that mostly just leaves my own personal health interventions. I'd like to think I've got decent longevity genes given how my grandparents all held on for a good long time. No history of heart disease, stroke, or abnormal cancer risk. We do seem to have a tendency for high blood pressure and sometimes our appendixes try to kill us and have to be removed.
I'm trying to build a supplement stack that helps with the blood pressure. Seeing decent gains. Shoutout to @thejdizzler for bringing Nattokinase to my attention.
I should probably quit drinking altogether, but it does make socializing much easier, and moderate alcohol consumption is EXTREMELY Lindy across virtually all of human civilization.
And then, if I get ALL the rest of this stuff sorted, and in a few years it looks like our singularity is still a ways off, THEN I will probably plunk some money down on Cryopreservation.
And for the money issue. Yeah. If we hit a 3-5 year long period of serious technological unemployment that makes virtually all white-collar work out of reach could wipe me out. But that implies a very odd world where we get something VERY MUCH resembling a human-level, reliable AGI and we don't see the singularity in short order after that.
There's some logic in the argument for "if AGI hits, we're all either dead or we're guaranteed to be wealthy either way so why bother saving any excess for the future, do what you will now."
But I'm too cautious to not hedge for the scenarios where things degrade badly enough that having savings is important or we get massive economic growth which causes equities to go to the moon but no major upset of the status quo beyond that.
I hear some AI bulls regularly talking about "the permanent underclass" and the concept seems very underspecified, and I somehow doubt that one's true wealth in the future is going to be defined by how much FAANG/NVDA shares you managed to acquire in the leadup to the takeoff.
Also divided on alcohol right now. On one hand like you say, it's extremely Lindy. On the other hand, even a drink will plummet my HRV the next day. I've settled on a compromise: drinking NA beer. Helps with not feeling super awkward not having a drink but doesn't cause the same health effects
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