Cryonics as Charity

There would be some number of digital people that could run simultaneously on whatever people-emulating hardware they have.

I expect this number to become unimaginably high in the foreseeable future, to the point that it is doubtful we'll be able to generate enough novel cognitive structures to make optimal use of it. The tradeoff would be more like 'bringing back dead people' v. 'running more parallel copies of current people.' I'd also caution against treating future society as a monolithic Entity with Values that makes Decisions - it's very probably still going to be capitalist. I expect the deciding factor regarding whether or not cryopatients are revived to be whether or not Alcor can pay for the revival while remaining solvent.

Also, I'm not at all certain about your value calculation there. Creating new people is much less valuable than preserving old ones. It would be wrong to round up and exterminate a billion people in order to ensure than one billion and one babies are born.

I think it would be fairer to compare your $1000/thousands_of_life_years figure against other equally speculative back-of-the-envelope calculations, instead of against AMF. Generally more speculative causes (such as xrisk reduction) can produce better expected returns, but with a greater chance that we're somehow fooling ourselves or ignoring an unknown unknown.

Also, where did the $1000 estimate come from? Does it include the probability of success of cryonics and the probability that we survive for thousands of subjective years without destroying ourselves?

More people adopting (or wanting to adopt) cryonics should increase the investment in research, which increases the chance (and most likely the certainty level) of it working. Also consider that higher tech methods may be more expensive to implement. Storage costs would certainly drop, but if it turns out you need ten times the equipment to do ten times the damage reduction it may not drop the cost overall, but still end up with higher utility.

I've already written a couple articles on this, but I'll summarize them here. Basically, your assumptions seem overly generous:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5w1/the_cost_of_universal_cryonics/ - My optimistic estimate was ~$6K for universal cryonics

http://lesswrong.com/lw/6xk/years_saved_cryonics_vs_villagereach/ - If you assume cryonics has a 100% chance of working, it's actually ALREADY matching Village Reach on a cost-per-year-lived basis, and the quality of life is probably higher. But p(Cryonics) = 1 is a very shaky assumption.

would give future people the option to run revived people instead of new people, but I don't think it affects the overall number emulated.

I'm confused. This argument seems to assume that creating a new person and letting them live for a year has the same value as letting an already-existing person exist for a year. But this is absurd.

Preserving additional 21st century minds would give future people the option to run revived people instead of new people, but I don't think it affects the overall number emulated.

That's not true. The investment funds will make a difference: by deferring consumption of resources throughout their lifetime, a cryonics patient is freeing up resources for continued compounding exponential economic growth until at least their revival.

I find a hundredfold cost decrease quite unlikely, but then, I'm not familiar at all with the costs involved or their potential to be reduced. If the idea of cryonics were accepted widely enough for it to be an acceptable alternative to more expensive treatment though, freezing old people with negative utility to society until a potential technological Singularity or merely the advent of mind uploading would not be far off - and that would be efficient even without cheap cryonics.