X-Message-Number: 29216
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Future discounting, was Re: CryoNet #29209 - #29213 [Kennita ...
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:45:18 -0800

Kennita Watson writes,

>I think a sense that things are moving along slowly would tend to 
>*increase* cryonics membership, because people might think "Dang, it's not 
>going to get here soon enough; I'd better be able to wait it out.". 
>Depression and hopelessness ("It will *never* happen") is the problem, not 
>optimistic scenarios of the future. The depression may have to do with 
>people's short attention spans and memories.  Murphy says "Everything will 
>take longer than you expect."  Live with it.  We got the timelines wrong -- 
>oh well.  Sometimes we get them wrong the other way, like with computers 
>beating humans at chess, and cracking the genome.

Unfortunately this attitude runs up against a fundamental aspect of human 
economic behavior -- future discounting. The present value of a hypothetical 
technological payoff in the 22nd century just doesn't look like a good deal 
to most people, even if they could survive somehow to take advantage of it.

We also have to consider the possibility that technological innovation 
itself has run up against physical, economic and cognitive limits, as 
physicist Jonathon Huebner argues in a paper he published a couple years 
ago:

http://www.box.net/public/cynj31non2

Huebner claims that the rate of technological innovation peaked in the 
1870's, and that the rate will become practically negligible by 2024, well 
short of the needs of people expecting to become immortal supermen.

Mark

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