Your life is in AI's hands
I don't want to die. Unfortunately, every biological organism on this planet comes with an expiration date which really upsets a lot of people, me included. Ideally, those other people and I would like to have a final say when it's time to for us to leave the life's stage. Right now, though, it's the cruel mother nature who still controls when the final curtain drops down. Continued advancements in science and technology will certainly move the balance of control in favor of those who prefer choosing their own time of death, but it'll take a while, perhaps a really long one, before we assume full control.Frustrated by the current and somewhat hopeless situation, people who call themselves "immortalists" have been searching for a way to defeat the tyranny of death. And they have found it in cryonics, the practice of freezing freshly expired brains (or whole bodies) in the hope that future technology will restore all their life-giving functions. This repaired brain, they hope, will be inserted into a fresh new body so that formerly deceased person can start living again.
Immortalists believe all this will be technologically feasible thanks to miracles of nanotechnology. I don't think they're wrong about that, but at the same time I wonder why these dreamers with a sense of the ever-accelerating pace of technological progress could have settled for such a singular and somewhat myopic vision of the future that doesn't extrapolate beyond revival procedures involving thawing and restoring meat. Let's be more realistic and consider a far more advanced version of the future.
There is very little doubt that sooner or later someone builds an AI capable of amplifying its own intelligence beyond anything imaginable by a human. If a group of programmers can ensure this AI always acts in the best interest of all human beings, it's likely that this humane AI will use its infinite intelligence to bring all those people who ever died back to life. After all, it'd be a humane thing to do. On the other hand, if the group of programmers fails to ensure this AI always acts in the best interest of human beings, then, even assuming cryonics works as planned, and all the frozen bodies could be restored to life, the AI that doesn't care about humans will not bother restoring them to life, or, worse, will restore them but might do horrific things to them, or make living into a nightmare. As a result, past and present immortalists can only hope to survive and have a chance to be happy if whoever creates the first AI can succeed in making this AI to always act in the best interest of humans. In other words, if humanity is unable to create a humane AI, cryonics will have turned out to be a wasted effort.
If the first AI is humane, the only remaining reason why all humans in history who didn't want to die will not return would be if the laws of physics or other unknown limits proved to be too difficult to overcome by this infinitely smart AI. However, it'd be foolish to underestimate the power of an infinite intelligence to overcome any obstacle in its way.
Genuinely humane AI, not cryonics, it seems, offers the only chance for survival and happiness. Consequently, whether someone survives or not past his biological death is not going to be determined by a decision to sign up to be frozen, but by a personal wish to survive even if this wish never crossed one's mind. In the most difficult case, humane superintelligence would probably have to go back in time to retrieve that information from a still-living mind. Those who choose to be frozen, however, do risk being restored into a living hell by an inhumane AI, therefore, it seems rational to choose not to get frozen. Besides, being frozen has no influence anyway on whether or not a person can be restored to a happy existence. Whatever happens to people in the future will be under sole control of future superintelligence.
posted by Heartland @ 9:39 AM
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