Ron Bailey has a dispatch from last week's transhumanist think-in in Chicago.

Color me skeptical but for all we know neither freezing nor uploading may ever be possible. Remember how back in the late 60s we were close to a cure for cancer, flying cars were just over the horizon in the 21st century, Minsky et. al. assured us that AI was just a decade away and fusion power was just 20 years out...

Well, freezing is clearly possible. It's reversing the process that may be problematic...

Well, I think both approaches are dead-end remnants of the brief ascendancy of physics and physicist thinking between Alamagordo and Skylab.

If you want to lengthen lifespan, the obvious approach is through biology, not low-temperature physics or computer science. We already know it's possible to lengthen lifespan by messing with an organism's genes. We already have evidence that our present lifespan has less to do with any general "wearing out" of somatic apparatus than it does with a genetic program of planned obsolescence.

So there's no reason to think it won't be relatively straightforward sometime in the next century to modify the human genome for at least a 200-300 year average lifespan. (And a lifespan free of genetic disease such as heart disease and cancer, for that matter.) That's a much firmer and better promise than either cryonics or cybernetics can make.

I mean...even if they revive your frozen corpse and cure your last illness, you're still an old fart with an unreliable old-model body, so you can expect at best a few more decades.

As for cybernetics...the present record of stability and robustness in electronics is pathetic compared to organisms. We haven't even begun to imagine designing electronic devices or electronic storage media that are resistant to entropy and microscopically self-healing, the way organisms are. Hence our media quickly decay -- DVDs and CD-ROMs have a lifespan of a few decades only -- and our electronics are subject to mysterious and unfixable breakdowns after a few years. Who'd want to be uploaded to an iHuman? You might survive about as long as a Battlestar Galactica episode on an iPod.

Heh, great post Carl. My take is that uploading, if somehow it were a high fidelity copy, wouldn't be such a problem even if computer technology remains somewhat unreliable. You don't need to have reliable computers in order to have reliable data on those computers. Backups, redundancy, etc get around those problems. Another problem might be that storing a human mind on computer might be extremely expensive. We really don't know how much information would be required (or desired). It might actually be used originally as a short term storage while a new body is prepared.

Well, thanks Karl.

I'm less optimistic than you about the success of repeated backups. Remember how much data we're talking about here. Exabytes, probably. How long will it take to copy that reliably? And if you make it fast enough to get done in only a few years, how good an error-correction mechanism will you have to account for transmission blips, static, passing cosmic rays flipping bits, media cracks and pits, et cetera?

One thing to bear in mind is this: we duplicate ourselves biologically as fast as possible, with amazingly clever "femtoscale" technology, and it still takes 15 years to make a copy (depending on at what age you feel children become functional adults) -- and then 4-5% of the time the copy is deeply flawed anyway. That should be a very sobering warning about the difficulties of duplicating any equivalent of a human mind. Are we going to do better than the speed and accuracy of DNA replication any time soon? Color me skeptical.

My concern would be that any future that can resurrect/upload frozen humans would be one that would have no place for anything we'd recognize as human.

So they might defrost us merely because we taste better cooked?

So they might defrost us merely because we taste better cooked?

Or maybe they upload the contents of your mind and use trillions of copies of you as an NPC in some ultra-super-advanced RPG. Don't worry, they'll respawn another copy of you after each time you die. ;)

At least that would be a job. I suspect niches in that economy for humans would be few and far between, when even the robots are far smarter.

Oh I dunno...we have lots of jobs for horses, pigs and chickens. Heh.

>> Backups, redundancy, etc get around
>> those problems.

Just imagine the legal issues if for example, Ken Lay had been able to upload. Once uploaded, is he a legal entity, a person? No doubt those in line to collect inheritance will say NO. Those who were cheated out of reclaiming their pensions and savings because of his death would say YES.

Would he be able to - taking a page from the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy - be able to spend the year dead for legal and tax reasons? Once any legal deadlines run out, could his uploaded self return to life claiming to be a person again?

If he made multiple copies of himself for backup, are THEY legal entities? If not, which copy IS?Could one copy be sued or arrested for bad behavior by another?

Lawyers will make *billions* working out the legal issues of uploading. That's your "killer app" right there - something that'll get the legal industry as a whole to invest in Uploading R&D.

...even if they revive your frozen corpse and cure your last illness, you're still an old fart with an unreliable old-model body, so you can expect at best a few more decades.

Any technology capable of repairing the damage caused by cryonic suspension would find full rejuvenation (and probably genetic surgery) child's play.

As for cybernetics...the present record of stability and robustness in electronics is pathetic compared to organisms. We haven't even begun to imagine designing electronic devices or electronic storage media that are resistant to entropy and microscopically self-healing, the way organisms are. Hence our media quickly decay -- DVDs and CD-ROMs have a lifespan of a few decades only -- and our electronics are subject to mysterious and unfixable breakdowns after a few years. Who'd want to be uploaded to an iHuman? You might survive about as long as a Battlestar Galactica episode on an iPod.

This is a solvable problem as long as there's no societal breakdown. Multiply redundant geographically distributed data shares on dynamic storage devices (e.g., hard drives) can make data pretty much immortal.

Any technology capable of repairing the damage caused by cryonic suspension would find full rejuvenation (and probably genetic surgery) child's play.

Geez, Rand, this is the logical equivalent of the old canard "if they can put a Man on the Moon, why can't they [insert random technological feat]?" You ought to know better. What evidence do you have implying that techniques or knowledge in field A (cryonics) will apply to field B (rejuvenation)? Zip, I'm guessing, since both are technologies about which we know next to nothing. This is not an argument, merely a wish.

Multiply redundant geographically distributed data shares on dynamic storage devices (e.g., hard drives) can make data pretty much immortal.

This, too, is a hand-waving wish, not a sound engineering argument. Forgotten about entropy? Multiply redundant geographical whatsis is just another way to say a very, very complex system. What happens to the MTBF of a very complex system?

Organisms work because they are self-correcting on many levels. Every time DNA replicates it makes a bucketload of errors -- but then fixes them. On a larger scale cells correct for errors in their biochemical pathways by other, balancing pathways, giving us homeostasis. On the largest scale the entire body compensates for errors by movement, growth, adjustment.

We have very little of that in artificial systems. It's barely found in things like checksum rules, signature hashes, and TCP/IP. There's a long way to go before it gets anywhere near the capability of biology. And I don't think the route is through ever more massive macroscopic systems. It's got to be bottom up -- we have to learn, for example, to write self-correcting computer algorithms.

No doubt we will, but at some point it seems to be re-inventing the wheel to try to construct the functional equivalent of a human body in silicon and steel when we've already got a very good working model in protein and carbohydrate. Why not just improve the existing tech? We're already learning how, very quickly. Why struggle to climb over the wall when a nearby door is open?

What evidence do you have implying that techniques or knowledge in field A (cryonics) will apply to field B (rejuvenation)? Zip, I'm guessing, since both are technologies about which we know next to nothing. This is not an argument, merely a wish.

It has nothing to do with the field of cryonics. Cryonics is how to freeze people with the minimum amount of damage. Because even at a minimum, the damage is extensive, repairing and reviving cryonics patients will require the capability to do repairs on a cellular level. This is the same technology as rejuvenation.

This, too, is a hand-waving wish, not a sound engineering argument. Forgotten about entropy? Multiply redundant geographical whatsis is just another way to say a very, very complex system. What happens to the MTBF of a very complex system?

No, it's a straightforward technology. We already do data verification and error checking when we copy to files and and transmit via TCP. RAID drives really are mirrors of each other. If you have a sufficient redundant number of them, you can guarantee data integrity as long as the drives are powered. There's nothing pie in the sky about this. It is a straightforward application of existing storage and networking technology. This is exactly what things like SHA1 are for.

No doubt we will, but at some point it seems to be re-inventing the wheel to try to construct the functional equivalent of a human body in silicon and steel when we've already got a very good working model in protein and carbohydrate.

I'm not necessarily proposing that we should. I'm simply pointing out that you're mistaken, that in fact we can guarantee data integrity much better using existing computer hardware than DNA does, or can.