Hi, I'm new to LessWrong, and happened to read the Normal Cryonics article shortly after reading about Roko's basilisk.

It seems to me that if you believe in Roko's basilisk, nearly the worst thing you could possibly do is to freeze yourself indefinitely such that a future artificial intelligence can have all the time in the world to figure out how to revive you and then torture you for eternity. (Technically, I guess, if you really/truly believe in Roko's basilisk, and still want to live during the period it activates, you probably are doing what you can to advance the "inevitable" AI, in the hopes that it will reward you. So I guess you could still be for cryonics.)

Even forgoing Roko's basilisk and just considering generic evil-all-powerful AIs in the future (similar to AM in Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"), or just the possibility of a bad future in general, seems to me to complicate the decision process for whether you should undergo cryonics. How do you weigh the uncertain future against the uncertain afterlife, and how do you choose between complete unknown (death) versus a probability distribution function (what we expect of the future), especially if you believe that PDF to be bad? (I guess from a rational point of view, you probably should at least do real number-crunching on the PDF to see if it's likely to be bad instead of making arbitrary assumptions, but the question still stands, as it is independent of how favorable that PDF is.)

Of course, the bolded question is only interesting if you don't assume that mere existence is the primary goal. If you think endless torture is a better state of being than complete cessation of sensation (and assume that the afterlife coincides with the latter), then your choice is clear, and freezing yourself can only give you benefit.

Notably, people contemplating suicide face a similar decision process, but the difference is I would argue suicide is fairly irrational, because while living you usually always retain the choice to die on your own terms, forbidding possibilities such as falling into a coma. Then if you make the reasonable assumption that it doesn't really matter when you die (in terms of what happens in the afterlife), you might as well stick around, because chances are your living circumstances can get better. In cryonics, if you assume revivability is possible (which if you don'...

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