I think you’ve got me backwards. If Hawking, for all his disability, can have a satisfying and fulfilling life, then so could a human mind instantiated in a computer, even if for some reason it lacked a mechanical body. It might not be the greatest, but it’s a damn sight better than being dead.
Cancer. Schizophrenia. Necrotizing fascitis. Minor injuries that never quite heal right and bother you for the rest of your life. Senility. Toothache.
Pain. Acute, chronic, stabbing, aching, burning. Mildly irritating or agonizing. Never-ending, insomnifying, soul-destroying, twisting everything you do or feel.
And, always, death, slowly descending like the hammer of inevitability, mind and body slowly rotting from the moment you’re born.
You mention data loss, and random freezes, and routine operations failing for no obvious reason. Our bodies already do those things to us every day.
I’m sure that the first posthumans will run into all kinds of unanticipated problems. Some of them will be horrific. I see no reason to assume they will be more horrific than the ones we already deal with every minute of every day, the horrors so familiar and commonplace that we come to think of them as normal.
