X-Message-Number: 15862 Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 15:06:04 +1100 From: Damien Broderick <> Subject: re: who will revive you? Bob Ettinger writes: >As for the "usefulness" to future society of revived patients, that is the >wrong question. People are ends, not means. I do believe this is the correct answer (bolstered by such practical replies as `Hey, I *paid* for revival up front'). It's true that there are plenty of places right now where people are being hacked to death for apparently trivial motives. It's surely up to all of us who are alive to do what we can to ensure that our own future societies are not that kind. >But even in those terms, there is >no problem. What use is a newborn? A "reborn" will be "useful" sooner than a >newborn. Hmmm. Maybe not, if the world we are reborn into lacks the capacity to rejig our ossified brain/mental structures. But that is fairly unlikely, I suspect, because many kinds of salient changes hang together. Which leads to... >(I leave out of account the radical "singularity" scenarios.) Aaargh! You can't, you can't! Well, you can--but you need to give a damned impressive principled reason why the future *won't* go in the Singularity/Spike direction, and go there pretty fast at that. My hunch is that to get the technology required for revival from current rudimentary forms of cryostasis, we'll need moderately advanced nanotech and very, very good computation, probably at the AI or Super-AI level. Once those desiderata are instantiated, we'll be heading almost vertically up the Spike, and all bets are off, or moot. I'd like to see a rebuttal of this general case, if there is one. Damien ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Damien Broderick / Senior Fellow, Department of English and Cultural Studies University of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, AUSTRALIA @: <> Unofficial biography/bibliography site: http://www.thespike.addr.com Australian Business Number (ABN): 98 674 378 153 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15862