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Comment by PeanutNore | Hacker News Reader

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.”

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Anyone who is cryopreserved, but is viewed as a villian in the zeitgeist of the future, could end up being booted up into a personal hell for the amusement/vindictiveness of future people.

If a 'Hitler' VM was publicly available online, how many people would torture it? What are the ethics around torturing virtual consciousnesses of evil people?

A heads up for anyone interested in such matters, but an episode in the latest season of Black Mirror is specifically about this :-) (Indeed, most of the season is about the ethics of simulated consciousness in various ways.)

Great show. Loved season 3. White Christmas in season 2 also touches on this.

As an alternative here's a outline of a resonable way someone might opensource their mind (credit to DataPacRat): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRSRWbAqtC48rPv5NG6kzggL...

That reminds me of a story, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" by Ted Chiang, in which people keep AIs as pets. But they don't dare let them on the internet because when they did, trolls would torture them. So the AIs could only live in walled garden type virtual worlds.

Iain Banks' novel "Surface Detail" describes virtual hells where people can be tortured for eternity.

Altered Carbon explores virtual torture pretty extensively in its first season. Acting is sub-par, but concepts are intriguing as all hell.

Because it’s fine and dandy to torture or dehumanize people you disagree with like evil Nazis, left/right wingers, people who eat pizza on tuesdays - so long as the powers that be sanction and approve it. I look forward to our future “torture Hitler” VR amusement parks.

I imagine archaeologists of the future will talk condescendingly about us the same way we talk about the ancient Egyptians and their quaint belief that things they did to the body would have some kind of effect in the afterlife.

Nonetheless, here in our time, it brilliantly crosses/combines...

funeral services, a highly lucrative field

scifi, including all its expansiveness

the desperate compensatory technological hubris of people who know deep down that the world is quietly going down the shitter

and/or narcissism (on which nobody ever went broke)

We don't say the same thing about egyptian pharohs and embalming. We consider it a very interesting treasure of history. I'm sure if embalming was a process that let us revive ancient people, we'd do so because we'd really want to learn from them.

Guy needs to not be so pessimistic.

I'm sure most of us spend more than $10000 each year on prolonging our lives (food and rent). It doesn't seem very selfish to do it just once more.

Is $10k the full price of getting this done? I thought it was just the deposit to get on the waiting list.

Good question. I'm not sure exactly, but it seems the right order of magnitude. Alcor's website says that they cost $80k, and this should be cheaper since they don't need to keep the liquid nitrogen topped up.

Food and rent actually work.

My favourite:

> Altman tells MIT Technology Review he’s pretty sure minds will be digitized in his lifetime. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he says.

It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place [0] we just need to get access to, then all our dreams can come true.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon

> It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place

Like Tahiti. It's a magical place.

That part of the article was frankly outright disgusting. Laughing and mocking people for trying to save people's lives is cartoon bad guy. Making deluded strawman argument in order to discourage life-saving measures is horrifically unethical.

Dying is not something to be paraded around as a virtue. I only hope people figure it out sooner rather than later.

I don't feel too bad about it. If economic growth stays even slightly positive it won't take too many generations for our descendants to be unimaginably more wealthy than we are. They can put up with our brain banks and dry their tears with their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.

That's not how inflation works - in the future, the value of the dollar will be less, not more.

Not universally: The value of $1 (nominal) worth of computing resources and information storage in 2018 is surely thousands of times the value of $1 (nominal) worth of the same in 1958.

EDIT: Some quick math on deflation in storage costs. The IBM 305 RAMAC[1] was introduced in 1956, provided 5MB of magnetic storage and cost $3,200/month in 1956 dollars. To pick a random modern storage provider with a similar pricing model, in 2018 Dropbox offers 1TB for $10/month. Putting aside all the other advantages Dropbox gives you over a 305, the pure storage value of $1 (nominal) has gone from 1.6KB/month to 100GB/month, a multiple of over 50 million.

[1] https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html

Focusing on the exceptions doesn't help the rule. You could get an average US house for $20k and a brand new car for $2k in 1956, and a $4k annual income was a comfortable middle class living. Commercial flight wasn't just prohibitively expensive by modern standards in 1856, it was impossible, but you could live on $100 a year at the time.

If you want to pay 2118 people to resuscitate you (in the unlikely event the technology is feasible and people are willing and able and developed) you're going to need to invest that money well.

It is how investments and productivity gains work, however.

We are incredibly more wealthy than people of a hundred years ago, in almost every respect.

Yeah, one way I like to think about is if you could trade your current life for being a billionaire 100, 200, etc years ago, would you?

>their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.

The fed would never allow this to happen. That would be deflation.

What we should pray for is $0.25 loaves of bread, $10 rent, and a $1000 minimum wage.

We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone.

That is still deflation. Deflation is any decrease in the general price level of goods and services. It does not matter if it is due to increased production by advanced AI robots, etc. After all, if you knew you can get something cheaper tomorrow, why spend at all? Like you said, the Fed will run against this.

because you need food to live. no amount of tightness on spending can delay the necessity of food.

it always boggles me why people scoff at deflationary economics with this line of reasoning - i see little evidence that the average person is so wise with spending money today.

It always boggles me that people scoff at the notion of people deferring many purchases and not investing at all in a deflationary economy because the relatively small fraction of spending which is necessary for survival is likely to be unaffected.

I wasn't trying to be pedantic, but if you want to go there, feel free to consult the chart[1]. There's plenty that's become more expensive in real dollars, and there exists a strange cohort of people that believe real wage gains are a form of inflation. My worry is that these same people frequently sit at the helm of our monetary system.

My point remains:

> We want a future where human time is valued and basic resources are plentiful enough to be cheap for everyone.

1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-chart-shows-the-moder...

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