Robin Hanson y Eliezer Yudkowsky quieren ser criogenizados para tener la posibilidad de vivir eternamente. La criogenización consiste en la congelación del cuerpo humano inmediatamente después de morir con el propósito de mantener intacto el cerebro hasta que se desarrolle la tecnología para escanearlo y reproducir una copia que a efectos prácticos será una continuación de nuestro "yo". Hanson y Yudkowsky asignan una probabilidad relativamente alta al desarrollo futuro de tecnologías de emulación cerebral, y también asignan una probabilidad alta a la posibilidad de que la congelación no destruya información necesaria para un escáner cerebral. La idea me parece fascinante.
Yes even with modern anti-freezes, freezing does lots of damage, perhaps more than whatever else was going to kill you. But bodies frozen that cold basically won't change for millennia. So if whole brain emulation is ever achieved, and if freezing doesn't destroy info needed for an em scan, ifs we think more likely than not, future folks could make an em out of your frozen brain. Since most folks who die today have an intact brain until the rest of their body fails them, more likely than not most death victims today could live on as (one or more) future ems. And if future folks learn to repair freezing damage plus whatever was killing victims, victims might live on as ordinary humans.
Hanson identifica varios problemas que en su opinión tienen solución:
- If too many folks are frozen, the future might not want to revive them all. But in four decades of cryonics, only about a thousand folks have signed up, and a hundred have actually been frozen. So this isn't remotely problem yet. And by investing, frozen folk could easy pay to be revived.
- Some people don't want to live as future ems. Maybe we'll just have to let such prudes die.
- Many people don't want to come back to a world without their friends and associates. But the more who are frozen, the less of a problem this becomes. Sign up together with your loved ones.
- Organizations charged with keeping bodies frozen could fail before revival is possible. But the more who are frozen, the less often this will happen, and the cheaper cryonics will become as well. There are huge scale economies to freezing folks.
La criogenización no tiene nada de ciencia ficción, ya se está llevando a cabo desde años en Estados Unidos por parte de la empresa Alcor. Otra cosa es que en el futuro sea posible reproducir el cerebro congelado como creen Hanson y Yudkowsky, pero su tesis parece plausible.
