In a little while, we’ll blow out this last candle and spend a minute in darkness and silence. Before we do, I want to finish the story of Hal Finney.
Later in 2009, Finney posted the following comment, again slightly edited for flow:
There has been noticeable progression. My initial symptoms were in my speech, a slight slowing and breathlessness; shortly after, my hands felt odd and a bit shaky while writing. This was stable as I said for a few months. But in the last two months my voice has gotten much weaker and softer, and somewhat more slurred; and my hands, especially my right hand, have lost strength.
It is annoying and worrisome that my initial symptoms are showing up in my voice and hands, the two most used and highest bandwidth sources of output available. Everyone’s progression is different with this disease, so I don’t know what to expect in terms of rate of progress or degree of disability at various points in the future. My whole plan revolves around retaining some degree of outgoing communication, but I had hoped to be able to wait until near the end of the progression to be forced to rely on the more exotic technologies.
In 2013, he posted another update:
Today, I am essentially paralyzed. I am fed through a tube, and my breathing is assisted through another tube. I operate the computer using a commercial eyetracker system. It also has a speech synthesizer, so this is my voice now. I spend all day in my power wheelchair. I worked up an interface using an Arduino so that I can adjust my wheelchair’s position using my eyes.
It has been an adjustment, but my life is not too bad. I can still read, listen to music, and watch TV and movies. I recently discovered that I can even write code. It’s very slow, probably 50 times slower than I was before. But I still love programming and it gives me goals. Currently I’m working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors to support trusted computing. It’s almost ready to release. I just have to do the documentation.
I’m pretty lucky overall. Even with the ALS, my life is very satisfying. My life expectancy is limited. But I’m comfortable with my legacy.
In 2014, Max More sent this email to the Extropians mailing list:
Hal made it clear that once he lost the ability to communicate, he did not want his vital functions supported any further but should be allowed to promptly be cryopreserved. Hal and Fran Finney arrived in Scottsdale, Arizona on Tuesday where he was checked into ICU of a hospital near Alcor. After administration of drugs to ensure no consciousness, his ventilator was removed. Hal’s body kept going until shortly before 9:00 am this morning, August 28, 2014.
Immediately after pronouncement of legal death, Alcor’s standby team went into action, restoring circulation, ventilation, administering an array of medications, and initiating external cooling. Surgery is currently underway to enable us to replace Hal’s blood and interstitial fluids with cryoprotectant. Once perfusion is finished we will be able to plunge Hal’s temperature down past the freezing point without any significant ice formation. Once he is down to around -110 degC we will slow cooling and take a couple more days to reach the final storage temperature of -196 degC. After that, Hal will be placed in long-term storage and cared for until the day when repair and revival may be possible […]
Hal, I know I speak for many when I say that I look forward to speaking to you again sometime in the future and to throwing a party in honor of your revival.
And so we return again to the dichotomy between emotional resilience and necromancy. Once again, I won’t take sides. The prediction markets Hal loved so much gave him a 6% chance of making it. So the odds are slim. But still, here we are, gathered together to celebrate a holiday about how things that are dead and frozen sometimes burst forth into new life. I hope Hal gets his party at the end of the universe.
All this happened back in 2014. But I find myself thinking about it a lot lately. This was the year a lot of people started talking about death with dignity - yeah I see light bulbs going on over some of your heads. Eliezer and some other people I really respect started saying that AI alignment is going too slow and we’re not going to make it. I hate the death with dignity framing. Officially I agree with a lot of other bright people like Paul Christiano and Carl Shulman and Scott Aaronson who think our chances are actually pretty good. But this is the darkest night of the year, and the phrase “death with dignity” sure does have a way of clearing the mind. And I keep thinking it’s weird that we have this whole debate around dying with dignity and we’ve connected it with actual, literal dying with dignity. So, a few more words on Hal.
Hal’s Less Wrong post wasn’t just a story about grace and courage and those things. It’s a story about rationality. Despair is considered a moral vice. But it’s also a rationalist vice. It’s the opposite of the rationalist virtue of precision which says that “each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less.” You start with a belief structure. Then you learn some new fact – like that you’re going to die in a few years. Then you update everything by exactly the right amount. You don’t fail to update at all – that would be denial. You don’t over-update and land in a pit of infinite depression. You’re still going to wake up tomorrow morning, the sun will still be shining, and you still have twenty-four hours every day to work and play and do what needs doing. You just think: conditional on this new fact, how do I live?
Hal decided that he would live well. He spent time with his family, working on the open source projects he loved, and posting Less Wrong comments. He fought hard, hoped for a miracle, but didn’t depend on one. If there’s anyone left five thousand years from now, I hope they say the same of us.
Seriously, tomorrow morning I’ll agree with Paul and Carl and Holden and everyone else who thinks we have a fighting chance. For five thousand years the world has been psyching us out with fake apocalypses, admittedly it’s been upping its game recently but this could still be another one. Tomorrow could still be brighter than today, brighter than we can ever imagine.
But if I’m wrong - if we are all going to be destroyed by a bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep panicking about bombs.
When the bomb comes, let it find us doing well.
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