From my book Singularity Rising:
Communist dictator Joseph Stalin maintained power through killing millions of his countrymen and terrorizing the rest. He often lashed out at his old comrades, sometimes killing them and their families; other times he was satisfied with just jailing their wives. Stalin, who was denounced shortly after his death by his successor Nikita Khrushchev, must have known how hated he was. But the dictator knew that those who hated him were too weak or fearful to hurt him.
The first cryonics patient was preserved in 1967, fourteen years after Stalin’s death. But what if, I wonder, cryonics existed during the time of Stalin, and the dictator hoped to have himself preserved? Stalin was too smart to think his successors would have ever wanted him back. So if, at the beginning of his rule, Stalin had hoped to someday use cryonics, he would have had to be a less ruthless ruler. To have any hope at cryogenic revival, the world will need to want you back. So if the world’s leaders intend to use cryonics, they will have to care more about what the future will think of them.
Firstly, your comparison of Ayn Rand, a deceased novelist, to multi-decade tyrannical dynasties, is more than a little unhinged.
Secondly, the way that people act is strongly influenced by their surroundings, institutions, and social context. To think otherwise is the Fundamental Attribution Error. Castro and Kim don't have some special quality that would make them totalitarian dictators in the future; it's the nature of Cuban and Korean social institutions that have put them where they are. In a not-so-very-different world, Bashar Al-Assad would be an ophthalmologist in Acton. If future institutions are sufficiently inadequate, there will be plenty of would-be tyrants without worrying about a few cryopreserved relics being some sort of tipping point.
Thirdly, I suppose it depends on your view of mankind. There is no realistic way you can control whether people who are cryopreserved (or born) will be "good" or "bad" on net. So will, on average, more people lead to better outcomes? Or are human beings some kind of virus?
1) Does someone deserve the death penalty for advocating capitalism/bad philosophy/writing boring novels/whatever you think Ayn Rand is guilty of?
2) How would Cryogenics increase the longevity of the Kim dynasty? Either the Kim dynasty is still in charge when revival is possible, in which case you only change which Kim is in charge by reviving an earlier one, or they're not, in which case, why would the revived Kim be put back in charge?
Upvoted for the interesting question, then revoked the upvote for unnecessary mindkill-bait.
...but it's still an interesting question. It actually came to mind recently when someone I know and loathe died, and for a moment I thought "hrm. If cryonics was a widespread Thing, he would be less dead, and that would be bad."
It didn't take long to spot the obvious flaw: I'd trade the survival of people I don't like for the survival of people I do in a heartbeat, so the benefits of cryonics as a whole (in the hypothetical world where it works, which I'm not convinced of) still outweigh the drawbacks of bad people getting preserved. That's just the easy question, though. Working out whether it's OK to say "hey, even if cyronics becomes near-universal, specific individuals should not be preserved" is harder. If you believe permitting someone's death by inaction is morally equivalent to killing them, then the question reduces to the capital-punishment question. If you do not so believe...then I'm not sure.
If we can take cryonicist Jerry Leaf's account at face value, he assassinated people for the U.S. Government in Southeast Asia in the early 1960's. I got to meet Jerry two or three times and exchanged some small talk with him before he went into cryo in 1991, so I don't claim I knew him or anything beyond that. As I recall, he had some kind of military rifle on display in Alcor's facility in Riverside, CA.
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/Interview-JerryLeaf.html
Now, if Leaf had actually killed people with his own hands, does that fact make him a "bad person" who didn't deserve to go into cryo?
decide to freeze themselves to ensure they will continue oppressing their countries forever
I don't think a frozen corpse is going to oppress anyone, much less whole countries forever.
Human Life Good. It is a fault in the system that bad people can harm others. Frozen people harm nothing. Don't bring them back until Master Control protects all from all.
By the standards of the most likely futures able to wake the corpsicles, we will all have been barbarians. Some remedial education is likely to be visited on the risen, but not freezing people really isn't okay for anything short of capital crimes, and even then I'd rather have them in the freezer, so that if the future thinks better of it they can fix it.
I think that future morality would be different enough from current morality by the time it becomes possible to reawaken/resurrect/[please tell me what the LW term of choice is] cryonics patients such that cryonics patients in general would be regarded as less likely to be moral than people born in the future. Any future capable of bringing back cryonics patients would be highly likely to prevent crime in the cryonic population, and not let the Kim dynasty harm any future victims.
The main consequentialist reason to punish crimes is to prevent future crimes...
My visceral reaction was that "bad people" shouldn't be preserved. A second take relaxed that position quite a bit: the potential gain from cryonic preservation is massive (imagine living for hundreds of thousands of years). This makes death extremely costly (in comparison to a more conventional view of the human lifespan as more-or-less capped at 120 years). As such, denying cryonic preservation to anyone is an extremely unfriendly action.
That said, cryonic preservation is a costly venture. In the unlikely event that humanity were in dire straig...
This month's media thread includes a short article on some people's idea to have Ayn Rand frozen, which ultimately didn't happen. My first reaction was a shudder. I thought, I definitely wouldn't want Ayn Rand preserved forever. My second thought was, What right do I have to say who can and who can't get frozen?
Whatever your thoughts on Ayn Rand, I think this can spark an interesting conversation: What, if anything, should humankind do about people who are widely seen as harmful for the whole? For example, if the Castro dynasty in Cuba or the Kim dynasty in North Korea decide to freeze themselves to ensure they will continue oppressing their countries forever, should that be prevented? (And yes, my opinion of Ayn Rand is such that these examples came to mind.)