I'm not sure I would be a willing participant in such a program, even giving the governing body the benefit of the doubt and presuming them to be benign. Effectively, I'd have to surrender my ability to dissent - which I would never be completely comfortable doing.

My children would be free to do as they please.

My first thought is: SWEET! My brain, used in the future...it would be like a 2nd chance at life ! But I wonder that would be like. What part of the brain would the robot interface with? Lets assume the government wants nothing to do with the part of the brain that deals with memory. They rewire/program the brain to shut that function off  What if by some malfunction I remember something...everything?

Could you imagine one of these robots being in the middle of manual labor on Mars 200 years from now and "plugging in" to your memory banks? Would it be like some sort of awakening? How frightening! And I am going to go a bit Bradbury on this (assuming the govt. really doesn't want 'thinking' robots...at least beyond the robots task) and wonder if said robot is discovered to be more then just the machine completing the task, would it be destroyed/re programmed? Sounds like a bit of hell to me but I have one heck of an imagination.

 My robot's going to have the strength of five GO-rillas!

Sounds like something Doomed Soul would like.

I've had arrangements for cryonic suspension (neuro option) with the Alcor Foundation since 1990. This sounds like an interesting option for my "second life" (not the silly online version).

BTW, regarding the "afterlife," what if scientists can establish empirically that an afterlife exists, but also that it doesn't last forever? How would religions based on forever-beliefs respond?

Some of them might argue that an after-afterlife exists, inhabited by the ghosts of departed ghosts.

OK, do you have any expectations of the world that you might wake up in?

I ask that because Larry Niven has written many novels based on that premise and pretty much none of them would be a good future to live in. His main series that uses cryogenic preservation is not about space travel (although it does exist in that future) but of what happens when medicine can cure essentially everything given the raw materials. It is basically a dystopia where body parts are harvested not only from the “corpsicles” (such as yourself) but also from convicted criminals. And that world is so freaking overpopulated that there is a huge black market for body parts and also a criminal justice system that imposes a death penalty by organ harvest for what we would consider trivial crimes.

That aside, he does have another series where the corpsicles are used as pilots for interstellar travel. It was this series that I was going to write about before I saw your post. Basically, this future world has the ability to copy a mind from one body to another but the process is destructive, so you only get one chance.

Also, they are colonizing the galaxy with sub light speed ships. This of course requires pilots who are willling to head off into the great unknown never to have contact with humanity again. So what they do is take convicted murderers, wipe their brains and copy the mind of a corpsicle into them. Then they run the person through a battery of tests to see if they really were willing to throw themselves into an unknown future or were just afraid of dying.

Those who were afraid of dying basically have never been able to adapt to the future totalitarian world that does this to people so they get wiped and they try again with a new corpsicle mind. When they find one that is useful, they train him to be a starship pilot and then send him off never to return. Mind you, with the technology which is available by this point, living for thousands of years is not much of a problem, so when you find a suitable world to develop, you get to be the official representative of the government while a new culture develops.

Here is basically how it could play out for you:

You are lying in your hospital bed dying. Then in what seems like a couple of minutes for you, you are awake and healthy. However, you are not in your own body. Once things have been explained to you, you are run through a lengthy series of psychological tests. Potentially several months worth. If you survive that process (and most people don't), you get sent off to pilot training. Eventually, you get a ship of your own where your only companionship is an intelligent computer that has to obey you.

At relativistic velocities, a trip of ten light years would take twenty of your years and a trip across the whole galaxy would take about thirty of your years. Not too bad if you can stand the solitude. Of course you only get to that point if you really can but whatever.

Eventually, you will find a world worth setting up a colony on and you will start the process of terra-forming it before deploying your cargo of frozen embryos of all the species that were sent with you, including humans. Then you get to interact with them from the point of view of being their benevolent sky daddy and dictator. Pretty much, you would function as their god.

Is that the type of thing that you want?

Yeah, but it will only be 5 feet tall...

I actually did read "A World Out of Time", back about 1977 or '78.  Niven is a good writer and I probably should pick up some of his books now and start reading them.  I was more into writers like Poul Anderson, Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and others at that time. 

My point really was that I would be bored out of my mind.  Solitude is not something I mind, however, solitude without anything to stimulate my mind would drive me nuts.  I'd rather they wiped my mind from the corpsicle.  If I could be put into a state of suspended animation or cryogenic sleep I could go for that. 

While I understand he wrote that from the perspective of mind-swapping, so to speak, being the scientific accomplishment of the time.  I was simply stepping into the current reality of technilogical advances and I think we are much closer to creating a hybrid man-machine than being able to transfer the mind of a person into a corpse that would also have to be re-animated.

I think the target time frame of 20 years for a self aware computer is probably about right.  There are computer programs now that allow a computer to "think" and "evolve".  Self-awareness has not been accomplished as yet in a program but experts in the field are working on it.

(http://www.ur.umich.edu/9293/Mar22_93/3.htm)

I agree with you, I don't think I'd want to see what the world will be like in a thousand years.  Especially if christian dominionists do manage to take over the government.  I think, however, if that happens the world and life on it will probably be destroyed with the damned jeebus freaks trying to hasten the rapture.  That might not be a bad thing, though, except for the people who have to go through it.  Maybe the planet would escape the mistakes of the past and keep life stupid and unimaginative so intelligent creatures couldn't destroy it again.  There I go, anthropomorphizing again.

 Keep in mind I'm not talking the FAR future here. More like not-quite-out-of-the-immediate-solar-system era. So if you were working for NASA you might be sent to Mars, one of Jupiter's moons, or somewhere in the asteroid belt. You'd likely be building habitats, terraforming, mining for resources, etc. You know, the kinds of things that make human colonization possible.

Or, you could go into fairly hazardous areas such as semi-active volcanos or deep sea areas. Places where sending a robot might be more ideal but impractical, for whatever reason - likely swift complex decision making. Or you could be an onsite supervisor for a whole set of robots, working in a less hazardous area while the robots do the kinds of things that have a good chance of destroying them.