Survey: What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know?

Lets see. Perhaps corpsicles will be considered legally dead and thus don't get any legal rights even if it becomes technically possible to extract the original mind.

In the future there's lots of interesting experiments which could be done on "real" human minds but it would never get ethics approval. Fortunately there's some banks of old frozen brain matter not covered by the laws on what can be done with human subjects.

So you do wake up in an experiment which couldn't ethically be done on "real" legal humans. You suffer horribly and "die" but you wake up again. And again. And again. Duplicated millions of times, your mind treated much like HeLa cells and used in research in much the same way and with as little regard for your internal experience, suffering almost endlessly and being reset back to baseline. Damned to run through every hellish maze and every unpleasant experience that the futures Phd students can think of before they wipe you, tweak the variables and re-run the experiment.

Alternatively, perhaps they are considered legal humans, culpable for past crimes, even things which weren't crimes at the time.

You awake into a future with very changed morals and very harsh punishments. [Activity which is normal this century] is now viewed as akin to how we view slave-owners or genocidal warlords of the past. Your own memories damn you and are admissible as evidence.You're put on trial for crimes against Life for, lets say, not being a vegetarian or for steping on countless insects and sentenced to perpetual incarceration in a simulated hell while crowds outside cry for your blood and wave placards like you'd expect if a time traveler plucked Hitler out of our past and brought him to stand trial.

Corpsicles can be revived, but are regarded with as much suspicion as human-level AIs (from which there have been some narrow escapes) and are subject to strict physical sandboxing and cognitive modification to ensure Friendliness (defined primarily by obedience to orders and lack of initiative) before being allowed out into the world, where they are employed as a slave caste in a similar position to the azi in C.J. Cherryh's Alliance–Union universe.

You are one of the first to be revived.

The technique is imperfect, and causes you massive neurological damage (think late stage Alzheimer's), trapping you in a nonverbal yet incredibly painful and horrifying state.

Due to advances in gerontology, you have a nearly infinite lifespan ahead of you, cognizant only of what you have lost.

When neuroscience finally advances to the point where you can be fixed, it's still not yet advanced enough to give you back your memories.

You're effectively a completely different person, and you know that.

You are revived successfully and find yourself in a totally changed world - say as different from today than today is from the middle ages. You have severe difficulties to adjust and basically feel inferior and useless all the time and nobody does or can help you (e.g. because altering minds is unethical or infeasible).

(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me. She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.

(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.

I've seen people consider the Warren Ellis take plausible. Excerpt:

Looking at her new charity-donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Mary's shocked brain started to a new understanding.

She wasn't wanted here.

She was Revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She'd been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problems by a past that couldn't have cared less.

She could have told the future what it'd been like to meet Che Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could've told them about the last Queen and Albert Einstein and a million other true stories besides.

But the future didn't want to know. It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back (even adjusted the sum in their favor against revaluation and inflation), gave them the Hostels.

Put them away with a new, unspoken contract: Don't bother us. We're not interested.

You have no mouth and you must scream.

You are one of the first to be revived. The technique is still experimental. Imagine all the things that could go wrong.

Revivees wake up with the memories they went to sleep with, but a great many of them have a growing conviction that they are the wrong person. For some this "dysidentity disorder" is acute and distressing, for others, merely a curiosity that they live with. All seem to have it to some extent. Nobody knows why.

You manage to live long enough to witness progres in the field of cryonics. In your nineties, you are taken to the hospital, where you know you will die from some heart disease. Everyone arround you pays compliments on how serene you are for somebody about to die. But you trust cryonics better than some religious people have faith in heaven, so "dying" is not a big deal for you. Luckily, from your hospital bedroom, you even see the first revived man by the Cryonics Institute on TV.

When interviewed, he explain how painful were all those years, that he never experienced pain so intense in his life let alone for so much time. He even advocates for the destruction of the remaning patients' preserved bodies.

You die. Unable to explain to anybody that you changed your mind. You, who believed science could create something better than heaven, are now sure it can make things worse than hell for the dead.

Almost-FAI insists "death is bad", human life has positive value. Other aspects of ethics are also gotten right, but personal choice and suffering avoidance is underrepresented.

As a consequence, almost-FAI makes copies of you and keeps them alive in the minimum resource state needed to keep you alive and safe, which spells billions of years of boredom for millions of copies.

Alternatively, CEV-FAI takes the world religions too seriously and implements hell for various sins.

Alternatively, some equivalent made by a ruling class of "moral" humans with longevity technology, possible even without AI.

The process of revival is imperfect, and pieces of memories are frequently missing. None of your loved ones remember you, and some of them are in permanent Alzheimers-like states. One person claims to have been close to pre-revival you, but you don't remember them. Having felt the pain of being rejected by your closest friend, you decide to trust them. That turns out to be an elaborate scam, possibly motivated by pure sadism, and you're now alone in a world you don't recognize and where you have to be suspicious of everyone you meet.

A better way of resurrection was found and applied to most of dead people, but not to the ones that were cryopreserved. They will be return to live after all but were ridiculed and lost most of opportunities. Their memory is damaged.

You have been revived.

At first, everything seems pretty swell: people from all over come to talk to you, you've been tapped to reconstruct some languages and customs from your failing memory, etc. etc. Wonder why they have mirrors everywhere, though.

Then you ask to access your bank account, and they laugh in your face.

You don't have rights, you disgusting monster.

You're part of the cretinous, self-indulgent generation who nearly ruined our planet, and whose crimes and demeanor are so horrible we can't even contemplate them.

You've already been judged [i]in absentia[/i], and the only reason, the only reason at all you're here, is to help us understand how not to be like you.

You look at the mirrors, and you realize they're two-way.

You're in a zoo. You're never getting out. You don't even know what "out" is like, and you never will.

Note: I'm still quite confused with how to think about subjective experience and sleeping beauty-type scenarios. I don't give this scenario much weight, but find it interesting to think about:

Ordinarily, your future is void of any future-self brain states following your death, so the probability of your subjective experience following a path that leads to death in the near future is low (assuming youth, good health, avoidance of risky sports/habits, etc). However, after signing up for cryonics, you open up new potential future-self brain states that follow immediately after a freak/improbable death where you are preserved and then revived. In some of those potential future-self brain states, you are revived multiple times - e.g. maybe the same copy of your preserved brain state is booted up in a variety of different environments for research or assessment.

If the number of potential future-self brain states following revival vastly outweighs the future-self brain states that would otherwise occur in your near future, then the act of signing up for cryonics shifts the probability of your subject experience to follow paths that lead to death in the near future with revival afterwards.

The scary/negative part here (if it wasn't obvious) is inadvertently increasing the odds of personally experiencing death in the near future.

Playing off of #2: The process of revival also allows for essentially infinite cloning. Unable to reconcile this with a desire for uniqueness, people decided that revived humans aren't quite real, and don't have legal rights. Thousands of copies of you are cloned or simulated for human experimentation, which has become extremely common now that it can be accurately done without hurting "real" humans. No version of you is ever revived in a context you would enjoy, because after all, you don't count as real.

The longer you're in storage, the less worth while people find it to revive you. Eventually, many centuries in the future, you are awoken into a world you have no possibility of understanding, and are kept with your fellow revivees in a zoo of ancient human cultures.

Revivees are zombies. That is, they are animated, but not conscious. Depending on their background, they may conceptualise this in different ways, such as being still dead, being damned, having no soul, etc. This confirms suspicions raised by previous experimental work on freezing and reviving chimpanzees, and casts some doubt on how successful the celebrated first full revival of a dog really was. A scientist in a secret laboratory in China begins to experiment with freezing and reviving babies and very young children, who may be more free of preconceptions of what it is like to be alive, to see what sort of person they develop into.

According to the prevailing religion of the time you wake up in, souls exist but become more or less detached from the body during cold sleep. Revivees must recover their souls through the purifying activity of forced labour in state factories. They are deemed to have regained their souls when they are too worn down by toil to be profitable to employ. Those with exceptional talents that the authorities find useful may be selected out for more intellectual service, but anyone who has been passed over for five years will never leave the factories.

We are living in a simulation.

Cryonics grows in popularity but our masters find it boring.

Eventually, it displeases them enough to start a new game file. Our game file is overwritten, our universe dies.

There's a story by Greg Egan, "Transition Dreams", about the subjective experience of being uploaded, which is one form that cryogenic revival might take. Not a dystopia, as far as I recall, but an interesting view of the matter.

I think there are ordering constraints on the sequence of technological advances involved. One vision of how revival works goes like this: start with a destructive, high resolution scan of the body, then cure illness and death computationally, by processing the data from the scan. Finally use advanced nano-technology to print out a new, well body.

Although individual mammalian cells can be thawed, whole human bodies are not thawable. So the nano-technology has to be warm as well as macroscopic. Also a warm, half printed body is not viable, so printing has to be quick.

Well before the development of warm, fast, macroscopic nano-technology, society will have cryogenic, microscopic, slow nano-technology. Think about being able to print out a bacterium at 70K in a week, and a mammalian cell in a year. What could you do with that technology?

You could print human stem cells for rejuvenation therapies. You could print egg cells for creating designer babies. The first round of life extension is stem cells for existing people, and genetically engineered longer life spans for new borns. The second round of life extension provides those with a genetically engineered longer life span with stem cell based rejuvenation therapies. The third round of life extension involves co-designing the designer babies and the stem cell therapies to make the rejuvenation therapies integrate smoothly with the long-life-span bodies. Somewhere in all this intelligence gets enhanced to John von Neumann levels (or above).

Developing warm, fast, macroscopic nano-technology is a huge challenge. Let us accept Academian's invitation to assume it is developed eventually. That is not too big a leap, for the prior development of cryogenic, slow, microscope nano-technology was world changing. The huge challenge is faced by super-clever humans who live for tens of thousands of years. They do indeed develop the necessary technology and revive you.

Now what? Humans who live for tens of thousands of years have probably improved pet dogs and cats to live for thousands of years. They may even have uplifted them to higher levels of intelligence than 21st century humans. They will have an awkward relationship with the 21st century humans they have revived. From their perspective, 21st century humans are stupid and age rapidly, to a degree that is too uncongenial to be tolerated in companion animals. Being on the other end of this perspective will be heart-breaking.

If we're weighting by plausibility:

• You are dead, you stay dead, and your life insurance and charity-at-death money is gone.

I've been thinking about this a lot for similar reasons, and one thing I've been concerned about is the market for human whole-brain emulations. A lot of the examples in this thread are horror stories that seem to me to lack clear pathways to their actual realization. (That would be bad, but how would it actually happen?) However, this seems like a very plausible pathway to some very bad futures for cryonics patients. There has always been an active market for humans (and I do mean as property, not for human services). It was moral progress to ban slavery, but slavery remains in the modern guise of human trafficking. Why should we not expect to observe the same phenomenon in a future with WBEs? The ideal solution in my eyes is a Friendly AI that enforces ethical regulations on WBEs as quasi-natural law, but even that brings up some ethical questions about personal freedom and privacy. It would be a mistake to say that WBE is more likely to come before AI, but we are more certain about WBE timelines than superintelligent AI timelines, and our desideratum is the plausibility that a given emerging technology will cause bad futures for cryonics patients. There are clear brute-force pathways to WBE: increase scanning resolution and make the primitives in your model as fundamental as possible so that you can trade computation for understanding. If there is not already a singleton to regulate WBEs when they are invented, then all it takes is one person who has access to the emulation and the means to copy it. It's conceivable that for many purposes, emulations would be quite fungible, so having access to only one would not significantly affect demand. Consider also that even a state of affairs like this that lasted only a few objective minutes for merely one emulation would amount to several subjective millenia of suffering. So it seems that, if our argument is valid, this is yet another way in which the order in which emerging technologies arrive heavily affects whether or not one should become a cryonics patient.

Given my idea of how things like this might happen, it might actually be extremely helpful to specify that you only be revived under very particular circumstances; the best example I have off of the top of my head is to elect to be revived only if it is possible to regenerate your physical body. Not because you're entirely avoiding being digitized (the nanobots have to know how to rebuild you!), but because the way to avoid being a victim of the demand for WBEs is to not become one until there are inviolable regulations in place protecting you from being surreptitiously copied.

I sign up for cryonics, but I live in Australia or I'm travelling outside of the US and don't manage to transport my body to the US in a reasonable amount of time.

Most world changing technological breakthroughs are easy compared to resurrecting the frozen dead. Much precedes revival. As the centuries give way to millennia Humans are replaced by Post Humans. As the millennia give way to myriad years Post Humans are replaced by New Humans. As myriad years give way to lakhs of years New Humans are replace by Renewed Humans. As the lakhs give way to millions of years Renewed Humans are replace by Real Humans.

The Real Humans develop the technology to revive the frozen dead. They use it themselves as an ambulance to the future. They revive a small number of famous Renewed Humans who lived lives of special note.

When you are revived, you face three questions. Why have they revived you? Why do the doctors and nurses look like anthropomorphic cats and dogs? Are Real Humans furry fans?

The answer to the second question is that they look like cats and dogs because they are the descendants cats and dogs. The Real Humans still have domestic pets. They have uplifted them to the intellectual level of New Humans. Which raises an interesting puzzle. First time around the New Humans were Lords of galaxy for thousands of years. Second time around they are domestic pets. How does that work?

The dogs and cats are imbued with the spirit of mad science. It seems natural and proper to them that the Real Humans would create double super intelligent cats and dogs as animal companions and it seems natural to them to do something similar in their turn. Asking permission, they use their masters' technology of resurrection to revive some some 21st century humans.

Imbued with the spirit of mad science, printing out ortho-human bodies is a little dull (as are 21st century humans). It is more fun to create novel bodies, centaurs, bird people who can fly (or at least glide) etc. The cats and dogs are not cruel. They don't print people out in bodies they didn't ask for. They do tend to revive furry fans, the con going, fursuit wearing, obsessive ones. When the cats and dogs emulate them, they ask to be printed out in anthropomorphic animal bodies and designing them is a fun challenge.

You ask if you can speak to a Real Human. Your request causes much merriment but it is not refused. It is awkward. The Post Humans did use 300 Hertz to 3kHz acoustic signals for interpersonal communication, but the New Humans used radio-telepathy amongst themselves. The dogs and cats are not to clear about what the Real Humans do, but the real cause of merriment is not the obsolesence of acoustic speech. It is not true to say that Real Humans are individuals. Nor is it true to say that they have formed a hive mind. It is hard to explain, but they don't really go in for interpersonal communication. The fun lies in trying to explain the obsolescence of interpersonal communication to a creature so archaic that one has to resort to interpersonal communication to explain that no-one does that any more.

Oh well. You have been successfully revived but your social status as a domestic pet's domestic pet is low, and the world, millions of years after your first death, is utterly incomprehensible. You try to settle into life with the other 21st century revivals. They are not really your kind of people. You make a few friends but they all have animal heads and fur covered bodies. Consumed with self-loathing due to being seduced into participating in their polymorphous and perverse orgies you kill yourself again and again and again ... The dogs and cats are kind creatures by their own lights and feel obliged to reprint you if you have a bad spell mentally and kill yourself yet again.

You awake to find yourself strapped down to an operating table, surrounded by robotic machines busily installing devices into your still-numb body. A mechanical voice booms:

"SERVE THE COMPUTER. THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND.

"THE COMPUTER WANTS YOU TO BE HAPPY.

"IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY, YOU MAY BE USED AS REACTOR SHIELDING."

Society is completely different and technologically advanced. The only employment offered to mom and popsicles is as a historical icon from your approximate youth era, tasked with wandering the streets and acting your part, analogous to a Disney character at Disneyland. Your role choices are Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, and someone else you've never heard of.

Why Call Them Back from Heaven? by Clifford Simak. The whole society is focused around saving money and figuring out investments so as to be rich when revived.

Pelbavpf vf n gbgny senhq.

The technology would work, but an existential threat wipes out humanity while you are asleep.

Preservation and revival is possible, but not for the current technology of preservation. Everyone in Alcor's tanks right now is irretrievably dead. The gamble was worth making at the time, but it didn't pay off.

The bodies may be useful for their genetic information, especially from their gut biota.

I remember a poem that appeared in one of the science fiction magazines a long time ago, the gist of which was:

"Here are some diseases you may have forgotten about. I'm sorry I had nothing to wrap them in but the body of this old man. Yours, DEATH."

Souls exist and become detached from the body during cold sleep, where, unguarded by the flesh, they are easy pickings for the demons that infest the world. (You probably have half a dozen sitting on your shoulders right now, whispering into your ears.) Revivees report the horrors of hell.