11 KiB
[D] Are there any near-future sci-fi stories centered on the realistic implications of cryonics?
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Author: u/notmy2ndopinion Concent of Saunt Edhar*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3ktwe0/d_are_there_any_nearfuture_scifi_stories_centered/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2015-09-13T21:22:37
Post:
I just read this NYT article on Cryonics about a redditor with terminal brain cancer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html
Aside from the misuse of the word cryogenics (when it should be cryonics), this article seems to capture the essence of transhumanism through the only method we currently have available (albeit as a long shot) for the preservation/continuity of human life.
However, as I was reading about the currently tenuous state of research on brain preservation (through plastics or freezing), connectomes, scanning/computing power, etc... it made me wonder if there were any rationalist, realistic, near-future sci-fi stories on cryonic revivification.
I'm not talking about Futurama, where someone falls into a chamber and is flawlessly preserved and reanimated.
I'm talking about a story where the experiment goes wrong and someone is brain-damaged in an unusual but accurate way because their basic brain pathways were revived with significant lossy decomposition. (I think that a re-cryonicked person would have a neurological disease like wernicke/korsakoff's psychosis to the extreme... read "the Lost Mariner" for how I envision that would look. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat)
Or a story where only preserved brains of significant "value" are reprocessed, because it takes so much computing power to actually simulate a human. How does one attain this high status in the future if they can constantly be outpaced by future generations who won't need decades of rehab and reorientation?
Or a story where people opt for cryonics during middle age, before their brains start degenerating from dementia, like an the inverse of Logan's Run. (and how does this change society?)
disclaimer: i do not believe that cryonics in its current state is viable. a neuron is not just a wire in a simple circuit and mapping the structural connections of a "connectome" does not make a human, imho. the map is not the territory! however, i do believe it is a worthy cause and we may be close to achieving viability in the future with more research on the biochemical operations of the brain, rather than treating each neuron as a simple wire in a circuit.
Instead, I think that the scanning/mapping needs to go a level deeper and treat each neuron as an individual circuit of biofeedback with electrochemical gates, signal-transduction from the membrane to the nucleus for genetic up/down-regulation for protein and biochemical synthesis/catalysis. Freezing or plasticizing a brain doesn't currently preserve any of this data, although someday... maybe?
Comments:
u/Drazelic [+10] Dai-Gurren Brigade (an hour later)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold is an interesting take on sociopolitical implications of cryonics. Specifically, it explores the question- 'what do you do with the theoretical legal power of those who are in cold sleep?'
Cryoburn answers the question with a curious system where people in cold-sleep are treated as people with votes as anybody else in a democratic system, except that since they can't vote themselves they pass off that right to the megacorp responsible for keeping them intact as part of the contract for passing into cold-sleep, incentivizing megacorps to get as many sleepers as possible to get more political clout- and also incentivizing them to engage in very, very interesting conspiracies when threatened with the risk of losing significant amounts of their zombie voter-base.
Also, it's a Vorkosigan Saga book, and I'm pretty sure that series is right up r/Rational's alley, what with all the mental problem-solving the series is about.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (2 hours later)
cool, I'll have to check that book out!
...
I had to google the "Vorkosigan Saga" and it looks like a fairly hefty series, with Cryoburn as #14 out of 16 books, according to this list on goodreads. Is it a stand-alone or do I need more of the background for context?
https://www.goodreads.com/series/98254-vorkosigan-saga-chronological
u/Drazelic [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (3 hours later)
It'll work as stand-alone, the plot is self-contained. However, the story of how Miles got the position in the government he got and his relationship with all the people he interacts with, that's an interesting story worth reading the lead-up for!
All the Vorkosigan Saga books are good Rational reads, in my opinion. Give them a shot!
u/eaglejarl [+1] (2 days later)
Seconded. Excellent worldbbuilding, great characters, action, adventure, smart plans..Bujold is brilliant.
I think my personal favorite from the entire series is the creation of the Dendari mercenaries.
u/Drazelic [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
I liked Falling Down the most, despite it technically being a sidestory that sets up the next book. What a batshit crazy plan that actually works somehow!
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+5] Utopian Smut Peddler (4 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/psychothumbs [+2] (a day later)
Oh man, that issue of Transmetropolitan is fantastic. I just went and reread it after reading your comment. And it's nice that the main revived woman featured gets a happy ending later in the comic. It's a good combination of showing how terrifying waking up after having been cryopreserved would be, and how much better it would be than just being dead (plus social commentary on the plight of the homeless!).
u/lsparrish [+4] (a day later)
The precise term isn't "freezing", but "vitrifying". In a good cryonics case, the solution replaces enough water to prevent ice crystallization. The freezing point is depressed and ice nucleation is inhibited. Instead of turning to ice, the fluids become thick and viscous, then harden into an amorphous solid like glass.
The reason nobody/no whole human brain can be revived yet is because the high concentrations of solutes needed have side effects that prevent cell viability. These mechanisms are not well understood, but may involve denaturation of certain enzymes.
(For less than ideal cases, obviously there are issues like imperfect perfusion due to perfusion impairment. So some ice formation can happen.)
u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (2 days later)
which, i imagine, in a brain after glioblastoma and brain surgery, could be fairly significant. /sigh
oh, and thanks for updating my terms. I do think that utilizing a solution based on tardigrades is important (not sure what Alcor's protocols look like, but I'd be much more encouraged if they are tweaking varying concentrations of hsp, glycerol, and trehalose as close to death as possible...
http://www.asknature.org/strategy/5647adb99bf90b1c723987c7683ea169
"…Tardigrades are known to enter cryptobiosis at any stage of their life cycle, from egg to adult. Cryptobiosis has to be considered a form of quiescence, being directly induced and maintained by the occurrence of adverse conditions for an active life, and promptly broken once the adverse conditions are removed…In tardigrades, there are several forms of cryptobiosis: anhydrobiosis, cryobiosis, anoxybiosis and osmobiosis. Anhydrobiosis is the most studied. Entering anhydrobiosis, tardigrades contract their body into a so-called tun, loosing most of their free and bound water (>95%), synthesizing cell protectants (e.g., trehalose, glycerol, heat shock proteins…and strongly reducing or suspending their metabolism…" (Bertolani et al. 2004:16)
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+3] Mouse Army (an hour later)
I dont know of any stories like that, esp. not contemporary ones. Cryonics was top theme in the 70s!
Larry niven in his "the state" series has Corpsicles...
Maybe crosspost to /r/printsf. they are pretty good there.
u/DataPacRat [+3] Amateur Immortalist (2 hours later)
Of possible interest: FAQ on LoadBear's Instrument of Precommitment
u/Empiricist_or_not [+5] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (3 hours later)
I was going to reference SI but LoadBear's instrument is better as our thawed fellows will likely start out as infomorphs.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (6 days later)
This is wonderful... bravo for coming up with a way to maintain your usefulness to future virtuals!
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (2 days later)
The only thing I can think of is that in "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001) one of the reasons the robot is abandoned is that they finally managed to get the boy he was supposed to replace out of cryonic sleep.