Breaking Down Cryonics Probabilities |
September 22nd, 2011 |
| cryonics, future, transhumanism |
In order to see how likely this is to work, we should look at the process. I would sign up with a cryonics company and for life insurance. I'd go on living, enjoying my life and the people around me, paying my annual fees, until some point when I died. After death they would drain my blood, replace it with something that doesn't rupture cell walls when it freezes, freeze me in liquid nitrogen, and leave me there for a long time. At some point, probably after the development of nanotechnology, people would revive me, probably as a computer program.
There's a lot of steps there, and it's easy to see ways they could go wrong. [3] Let's consider some cases and assign probabilities [4]:
| You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance | |
| Something happens to you financially where you can no longer afford this | |
| You die suddenly or in a circumstance where you would not be able to be frozen in time (see leading causes of death) | |
| You die of something like altzheimers where the brain is degraded at death (altzheimers is much more common than brain cancer) | |
| The cryonics company is temporarily out of capacity and cannot actually take you, perhaps because lots of people died at once | |
| The life insurance company does not pay out, perhaps it's insolvent, perhaps it argues you're not dead yet | |
| You die in a hospital that refuses access to you by the cryonics people | |
| After death your relatives reject your wishes and don't let the cryonics people freeze you | |
| Some law is passed that prohibits cryonics (before you're even dead) | |
| The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?) | |
| Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain | |
| The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything | |
| Other (there are always other things that can go wrong) | |
| Something goes wrong in getting you frozen |
|---|
| All people die (nuclear war? comet strike? nanotech?) | |
| Society falls apart (remember this is the chance that society will fall apart given that we did not see "all people die") | |
| Some time after you die cryonics is outlawed | |
| All cryonics companies go out of business | |
| The cryonics company you chose goes out of business | |
| Your cryonics company screws something up and you are defrosted (power loss, perhaps. Are we really expecting perfect operation for decades?) -- 2011-09-23: dkg points out that this isn't that hard: the frozen bodies have a lot of thermal mass which means you don't need completely perfect operation in order to keep you frozen. On the other hand, if they were already suffering these problems, it would be in their interest (the employees who messed up and the company overall) to hide them. Revised down from 40% to 5%. | |
| Other | |
| Something goes wrong in keeping you frozen |
|---|
| It is impossible to extract all the information preseved in the frozen brain | |
| The technology is never developed to extract the information | |
| No one is interested in my brain's information | |
| It is too expensive to extract my brain's information | |
| Reviving people in simulation is impossible | |
| The technology is never developed to run people in simulation | |
| Running people in simulation is outlawed | |
| No one is interested running me in simulation (even though they were interested enough to extract the neccesary information from my frozen brain) | |
| It is too expensive to run me in simulation (if we get this far I expect cheap powerful computers) | |
| Other | |
| Something goes wrong in reviving |
|---|
| Other | |
| Something else goes wrong |
|---|
Combined Probability Of Failure:
.
Odds of success: 1 in .
Meets jeff's 1:33 criterion: .
If you can think of other ways cryonics might fail, moving probability mass from "other" to something more quantifiable, that would be helpful. If you think my numbers are off for something, please let me know what a better number would be and why. This is not final.
Update 2016-03-16: An updated version of this model, with estimates from me and several other people, is here.
[1] To figure out what odds I would accept, I think the right approach is to treat this as
if I were considering signing up for something certain and see how much I would pay, then
see what odds bring this below $300/year. Even at 1:2 odds this is less effective than
village reach at averting death [2], so this needs to come out of my 'money spent on me'
budget. I think $10,000/year is about the most I'd be willing to spend. It's a lot,
but not dying would be pretty nice. This means I'd need odds of 1:33 to sign up.
[2] Counter argument: you should care about quality adjusted life years and not deaths averted. Someone revived maybe should expect to have millenia of life at very high quality. This seems less likely to me than just the claim "will be revived". A lot less likely.
[3] In order to deal with independence issues, all my probability guesses are conditional on everything above them not happening. Each of these things must go right, so this works. For example, society collapsing and my cryonics organization going out of business are very much not independent. So the probability assigned to the latter is the chance that society won't collapse, but my organization goes out of business anyway. This means I can just multiply up the subelements to get probabilities for sections, and then multiply up sections to get an overall probability.
[4] This has a lot in common with the warren formula, which was inspired by the drake equation. Robin hanson also has a breakdown. I also found a breakdown on lesswrong that seems really optimistic.
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I think it might be illuminating to put error bars on these probabilities (which you ought to be able to ascertain to the same level of accuracy as you ascertained the numbers themselves, right?). You may find there's a wide range rather than a sharp peak at the probability you calculated.
For example, I'd personally assign "It is impossible to extract all the information preseved in the frozen brain " a probability of 50 plus or minus 49 percent....
@Jim for the purpose of figuring out if one should sign up, though, I don't think error bars help.
As for "It is impossible to extract all the information preserved in the frozen brain", do you really put the probability at 50%?
Have kids. More rewarding.
@Walker: it's not either or. I could have kids and also sign up for cryonics.
Why do you have both "All cryonics companies go out of business" and "The cryonics company you chose goes out of business"? So far every time a cryonics company has gone under, they did not transfer their bodies to a remaining company. Since they have no money, they just pull the plug and let the bodies rot. So it only really matters if the one you chose goes out of business.
@Blair A cryonics company could go out of business either because of something that makes it hard to be a cryonics company, or because of something that affects that company in particular. For the first, perhaps electricity gets very expensive. For the second, poor financial management. Separating them is an attempt to make it easier to think about these separately.
This is similar to having separate entries for "all people die" and "society falls apart", when the second one is entailed by the first.
Is there any evidence that the state of the brain is actually preserved during the freezing process? Without any experimental evidence, I think the odds of it working are the same as the odds of any untested treatment, very low.
Would you want to be revived if only 90% of you was recovered? "Hey we got all of your memories, what do you need
Cont. those "values" things.
@Joshua: there is some evidence that the physical state of the brain is preserved. The current freezing process is called vitrification: they use chemicals that keep ice crystals from forming, and you get something kind of like glass. A rabbit kidney has been through this, cooled to -150C, revived, and put back into a rabbit, at which point it worked to keep the rabbit alive. [1] Brains are possibly more complex or just different from kidneys, so this is definitely not conclusive.
There's also a question of whether the physical state of the brain is everything. It probably isn't. Short term memory seems to have an electrical component.
I would be surprised if we could restore memories but not values.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/.../pii/S0011224004000264
I never took statistics, but is this helpful? :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odFOLDzzbDE
@Jeff Kaufman "do you really put the probability at 50%?"
I have to, because I can equally easily conceive that it's nigh-insurmountable as I can that it's almost technologically inevitable. Just like if you asked me what percentage of games won the Boston Red Sox had in 1938, I'd have to say I could equally well believe it was 70% as 30%, so I'd say 50-plus-or-minus-20 percent.
You have the probability of defrosting due to a technical mistake, excluding business or social collapse, at 40%. I don't see how it could be so high unless it bakes in an expectation that cryonics operators are cutting corners in a big way. (Perhaps they are, of course; I have no idea.)
As I see it, the operation is: pack the bodies in a lot of thermal mass, and don't let the coolers go down long enough for that mass to thaw by some delta. Big financial and Internet businesses have datacenters with next to no downtime, and a server farm is tremendously more complex and sensitive than a compressor farm. Maybe no one is willing to pay what five-nines cryonic cooling would cost in setup/maintenance/staff, but it sure seems possible. Am I missing something?
Jeff, I think your estimate for these two are significantly low:
Oops, I hit enter. I wanted a carriage return. You die suddenly or in a circumstance where you would not be able to be frozen in time (see leading causes of death) You put this at 0.06. I think it's much higher.
You die of something like altzheimers where the brain is degraded at death (altzheimers is much more common than brain cancer) What is the incidence of Alzheimers, brain injury, etc. I think it's much higher than .04.
@Rick: one nice thing about investigating these two is that we can actually get decent data. I got the numbers from http://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf
For dying while not being able to be frozen, while accidents are currently my largest chance of dying (as a 25-40 year old male), table B on p5 says that 5% of american deaths in 2007 were due to "accidents (unintentional injuries)". Another 0.8% were due to homicide. I assumed that within the 18.6% of 'other' there might be ~0.2% of other similar things.
Now that you mention it, though, I could die of something like a heart attack while far from a hospital or something. So I should probably raise this probability to account for that. Do we know how common it is for people to die suddenly, of all causes (excluding accidents and homicide, which we listed above)?
Altzheimers kills 3.1% of americans. The cdc link doesn't break brain cancer own from cancer, but http://cancer.emedtv.com/bra.../brain-cancer-statistics.html says 12760 americans died of brain cancer in 2005, which looks like 0.5%. There are probably people with brain cancer or altzheimers that don't die of them, though, so I bumped it up to 6%.
There are probably other diseases that degrade your brain. They're probably not nearly as common as brain cancer and altzheimers, though.
Also, if you press return before you intended to, if you go to the upper right of your comment within 10sec there will appear an 'x'. If you click it it will let you edit your post. (If you waited too long it will just ask you to confirm you want to delete your post).
@David German You may be right that it's too high. I think the important thing is that you can actually have quite a bit of downtime without heating the bodies above a threshold.
On the other hand, they could be accidentally defrosting people somewhat often, but it's in their interest (both the individual employees and the company) to hide that. This doesn't seem all that likely.
I'll revise this from 40% down to 5%.
In which case, highlight the comment, control+c, confirm delete, paste in new comment, edit, and enter. Easy enough.
Cryonics is just another way for con-artists to profit off of our fear of death.