6 ms·

Reconstructing a human in silico from a dead brain is likely to be a very expensive process. Why would anyone in the future be interested in going through with

Reconstructing a human in silico from a dead brain is likely to be a very expensive process. Why would anyone in the future be interested in going through with it for any more than a few select old brains when there will be plenty of dead brains to go around at that time?

Talyen42 9y ago
that's why you bury some treasure and keep the location locked away in your brain!
- Jeff_Brown 9y ago
  And hope they haven't learned to synthesize it or mine it from asteroids when it's time to wake up.
cliffy 9y ago
Would probably start out as being prohibitively expensive and trend towards relatively cheap if it's possible and there's demand. If it's possible then it's hard to imagine there not being demand.
prepend 9y ago
You memorize the bitcoin private key before preservation. In a way that requires consciousness to reconstruct. Public key verifies the value and there’s a smart contract with some percentage to the successful recoverer. Depending on the recoverer’s profit margin they will restore whenever there’s enough value to make it worthwhile. Whether bitcoin will exist and whether it will appreciate is a different story. But assuming bitcoin exists, resurrection is a certainty.
- carbocation 9y ago
  Then they threaten to resurrect you 1000x and torture each of your resurrected selves for 1000 years unless you tell them the private key. Roko's basilisk meets bitcoin.
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    Yeah but by the same logic as The Simulation Hypothesis if I am not being tortured now Rokos basilisk will never come to pass.
    - sulam 9y ago
      The simulation hypothesis just means you have a very low chance, not that it's zero.
  - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
    Meets Altered Carbon. But if you wake up in virtual reality, when you enter your key, how can you keep them from taking it from you? You'll never know if you are being man-in-the-middled.
    - piracykills 9y ago
      We constructed a whole reality to steal your keys - the world's most advanced phishing attack.
      - ada1981 9y ago
        This is basically the thesis of evangelical Christianity.
        kolpa 9y ago
        That's what "Roko's basilisk" mentioned upthread is. An AI cyberpunk version of evangelical Christianity.
      - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
        In the world of altered carbon, it's pretty trivial to boot someone's mind up in a vr, even poor people at home can do it.
    - prepend 9y ago
- xiphias 9y ago
  Why restore the whole brain if the value is in the private key? Why not just read the private key from the brain and steal it? I would go the old fashioned route and store the Bitcoins in a bank safe and prepay it for 200 years, by which resurrecting people should be either trivial or humanity won't exist). Still, there's no trustless way to do this.
- kaizendad 9y ago
  So then this becomes something like the fast money/slow money system in Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood: people destroy their physical bodies to take slow trips to distant locations, preparing themselves by stockpiling slow money, like bitcoin, that will have significant value in the future but may not have so much now.
  - prepend 9y ago
    I hadn’t read that, but I added it to my list. Sounds interesting. There have been compound interest sci-fi for a while. I remember the Lazarus Long stories by Heinlein and Orson Scott Card wrote Worthing Saga.
Eliezer 9y ago
Kindness. It's an endangered species nowadays but it used to increase with time and wealth, and perhaps when wealth rises again the trend will return. Or I'll do it myself if I can.
nmeofthestate 9y ago
>likely to be a very expensive process. Obviously it's a huge punt with no guarantee of success, but I would think that in a future that supports such a procedure, the concept of "expensive" won't exist to the same degree as it does now.
- lev99 9y ago
  Current trends show a future with a higher population and more income inequality. This describes a world where "expensive" is still a thing. I'm not saying you are incorrect about the future, just pointing out it's against several long term trends.
  - prepend 9y ago
    Current trends show a stabilizing population around 11 billion just after 2100. Income inequality and “expensive” are not exclusive. If the median income is $1B in current dollars with lots of zettanaires (10^21 vs 10^9 for bikkionaires) you will have high income inequality but still have plenty with few things expensive. Income inequality, with no other info, is not necessarily bad. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/ https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/
    - lev99 9y ago
      >Income inequality, with no other info, is not necessarily bad. I hold a contradictory view. Inequalities in income and wealth means inequalities in power. Inequalities in power lead to unstable social systems. My view is that this holds true regardless of the baseline standard of living. >11 billion just after 2100 Right, so current trends show a 30% growth in population between now and 2100. That doesn't contradict what I said. EDIT: I'd like to specify all inequalities do not lead to unstable systems, but very large inequalities do.
    - notahacker 9y ago
      The population won't stabilize around 11 billion in the unlikely event that affordable solutions to significantly extend life exist, never mind the technology to resurrect the dead from stored brains...
100k 9y ago
Charles Sheffield wrote a novel based on this premise. "[H]e devotes all his energies for a decade prior to his freezing, in becoming an expert primary source on the musically notable people of his era. Assuming that if you become the world's foremost expert in any subject, and given infinite time, someone will want to write a book on that exact subject." If I recall correctly, the protagonist intentionally leaves tantalizing bits out of his books, so future historians will want to wake him up to ask him personally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_(novel)
OscarCunningham 9y ago
You can leave money to be paid to whoever revives you. The money will be invested so as to not lose value. Eventually the cost of revival will fall below the reward, and you'll be revived. Obviously several things could go wrong, but the plan isn't obviously doomed.
ImSkeptical 9y ago
I have thought about building a project that would try to maintain wealth after my death. I imagine the components of this as being... 1. Logic to accumulate wealth. This would need an API to create and manage an investment account for stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever. It analyses current and historical data for a time, then makes investment decisions based on minimizing risks and long term gains. 2. A reproduction module. This would be responsible for finding a freelance programmer to produce new versions of each module keeping the system current. This would need methods like findReliableFreelancer or provideSpec runTests and issuePayment. 3. Cloning. Like the Reproduction module, but this will be done entirely with the system's own code and not recruiting a new developer. E.g. create a new AWS account, get a new host, copy your modules, get it running, do the sanity checks, provide it seed money. 4. Orchestration. The various hosts running this code would need to communicate, reporting their existence, the money they have available, etc. If the system winds up having some purpose (e.g. convincing someone to restore me after death) then orchestration might come up. Otherwise this could be used to limit reproduction, stop sharing resources with bad actors, and share resources with good actors. This would also need to track which systems we were already running on (e.g. if we are currently 80% on AWS we should direct expansion towards Digital Ocean, or future equivalents, try to expand into different languages, countries, and planets). I imagine kicking the project off a decade or two before my anticipated death in order to work out kinks and to hopefully live long enough to verify it will actually work and grow in real life conditions. After my death, I imagine it running for centuries, slowly accumulating more and more wealth. Perhaps disbursing some amount every decade if I could think of a way to track descendents. Maybe asking people to restore me from cryo freezing. Maybe just creating a legal puzzle for folks 500 years from now, when they have to unwind what might be a multibillion dollar fortune belonging to someone long gone.

Talyen42 9y ago

that's why you bury some treasure and keep the location locked away in your brain!

Jeff_Brown 9y ago
And hope they haven't learned to synthesize it or mine it from asteroids when it's time to wake up.

cliffy 9y ago

Would probably start out as being prohibitively expensive and trend towards relatively cheap if it's possible and there's demand. If it's possible then it's hard to imagine there not being demand.

prepend 9y ago

You memorize the bitcoin private key before preservation. In a way that requires consciousness to reconstruct. Public key verifies the value and there’s a smart contract with some percentage to the successful recoverer. Depending on the recoverer’s profit margin they will restore whenever there’s enough value to make it worthwhile. Whether bitcoin will exist and whether it will appreciate is a different story. But assuming bitcoin exists, resurrection is a certainty.

carbocation 9y ago
Then they threaten to resurrect you 1000x and torture each of your resurrected selves for 1000 years unless you tell them the private key. Roko's basilisk meets bitcoin.
- Avshalom 9y ago
  Yeah but by the same logic as The Simulation Hypothesis if I am not being tortured now Rokos basilisk will never come to pass.
  - sulam 9y ago
    The simulation hypothesis just means you have a very low chance, not that it's zero.
- Jesus_Jones 9y ago
  Meets Altered Carbon. But if you wake up in virtual reality, when you enter your key, how can you keep them from taking it from you? You'll never know if you are being man-in-the-middled.
  - piracykills 9y ago
    We constructed a whole reality to steal your keys - the world's most advanced phishing attack.
    - ada1981 9y ago
      This is basically the thesis of evangelical Christianity.
      - kolpa 9y ago
        That's what "Roko's basilisk" mentioned upthread is. An AI cyberpunk version of evangelical Christianity.
    - Jesus_Jones 9y ago
      In the world of altered carbon, it's pretty trivial to boot someone's mind up in a vr, even poor people at home can do it.
  - prepend 9y ago
xiphias 9y ago
Why restore the whole brain if the value is in the private key? Why not just read the private key from the brain and steal it? I would go the old fashioned route and store the Bitcoins in a bank safe and prepay it for 200 years, by which resurrecting people should be either trivial or humanity won't exist). Still, there's no trustless way to do this.
kaizendad 9y ago
So then this becomes something like the fast money/slow money system in Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood: people destroy their physical bodies to take slow trips to distant locations, preparing themselves by stockpiling slow money, like bitcoin, that will have significant value in the future but may not have so much now.
- prepend 9y ago
  I hadn’t read that, but I added it to my list. Sounds interesting. There have been compound interest sci-fi for a while. I remember the Lazarus Long stories by Heinlein and Orson Scott Card wrote Worthing Saga.

Eliezer 9y ago

Kindness. It's an endangered species nowadays but it used to increase with time and wealth, and perhaps when wealth rises again the trend will return. Or I'll do it myself if I can.

nmeofthestate 9y ago

>likely to be a very expensive process. Obviously it's a huge punt with no guarantee of success, but I would think that in a future that supports such a procedure, the concept of "expensive" won't exist to the same degree as it does now.

lev99 9y ago
Current trends show a future with a higher population and more income inequality. This describes a world where "expensive" is still a thing. I'm not saying you are incorrect about the future, just pointing out it's against several long term trends.
- prepend 9y ago
  Current trends show a stabilizing population around 11 billion just after 2100. Income inequality and “expensive” are not exclusive. If the median income is $1B in current dollars with lots of zettanaires (10^21 vs 10^9 for bikkionaires) you will have high income inequality but still have plenty with few things expensive. Income inequality, with no other info, is not necessarily bad. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/ https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/
  - lev99 9y ago
    >Income inequality, with no other info, is not necessarily bad. I hold a contradictory view. Inequalities in income and wealth means inequalities in power. Inequalities in power lead to unstable social systems. My view is that this holds true regardless of the baseline standard of living. >11 billion just after 2100 Right, so current trends show a 30% growth in population between now and 2100. That doesn't contradict what I said. EDIT: I'd like to specify all inequalities do not lead to unstable systems, but very large inequalities do.
  - notahacker 9y ago
    The population won't stabilize around 11 billion in the unlikely event that affordable solutions to significantly extend life exist, never mind the technology to resurrect the dead from stored brains...

100k 9y ago

Charles Sheffield wrote a novel based on this premise. "[H]e devotes all his energies for a decade prior to his freezing, in becoming an expert primary source on the musically notable people of his era. Assuming that if you become the world's foremost expert in any subject, and given infinite time, someone will want to write a book on that exact subject." If I recall correctly, the protagonist intentionally leaves tantalizing bits out of his books, so future historians will want to wake him up to ask him personally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_(novel)

OscarCunningham 9y ago

You can leave money to be paid to whoever revives you. The money will be invested so as to not lose value. Eventually the cost of revival will fall below the reward, and you'll be revived. Obviously several things could go wrong, but the plan isn't obviously doomed.

ImSkeptical 9y ago

I have thought about building a project that would try to maintain wealth after my death. I imagine the components of this as being... 1. Logic to accumulate wealth. This would need an API to create and manage an investment account for stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever. It analyses current and historical data for a time, then makes investment decisions based on minimizing risks and long term gains. 2. A reproduction module. This would be responsible for finding a freelance programmer to produce new versions of each module keeping the system current. This would need methods like findReliableFreelancer or provideSpec runTests and issuePayment. 3. Cloning. Like the Reproduction module, but this will be done entirely with the system's own code and not recruiting a new developer. E.g. create a new AWS account, get a new host, copy your modules, get it running, do the sanity checks, provide it seed money. 4. Orchestration. The various hosts running this code would need to communicate, reporting their existence, the money they have available, etc. If the system winds up having some purpose (e.g. convincing someone to restore me after death) then orchestration might come up. Otherwise this could be used to limit reproduction, stop sharing resources with bad actors, and share resources with good actors. This would also need to track which systems we were already running on (e.g. if we are currently 80% on AWS we should direct expansion towards Digital Ocean, or future equivalents, try to expand into different languages, countries, and planets). I imagine kicking the project off a decade or two before my anticipated death in order to work out kinks and to hopefully live long enough to verify it will actually work and grow in real life conditions. After my death, I imagine it running for centuries, slowly accumulating more and more wealth. Perhaps disbursing some amount every decade if I could think of a way to track descendents. Maybe asking people to restore me from cryo freezing. Maybe just creating a legal puzzle for folks 500 years from now, when they have to unwind what might be a multibillion dollar fortune belonging to someone long gone.