CI does full body for $30,000, but for a young person the actual payments to a life insurance policy would only be $9000 thanks to compound interest.
Somebody who is already 75 years old wouldn't get that benefit, but we're talking about the cheapest possibility, which would be for a young person.
Note, though, that you're talking about costs for people living in the First World. If you live in Sudan, for example, I doubt you can get access to cryonics short of paying for it all upfront in full: after all, who would want to insure someone's life when they live in such a deadly country.
How good a record is good enough? In truth, I don't think we even know enough to get the order of magnitude right. The best I can offer is that you need to record as much as you are willing to.
But this estimate is essential. By deciding to pursue this course of action, you in effect state that you estimate sufficient probability of it being enough to justify the additional effort. You can't say "I don't know" and act on this knowledge at the same time.
Perhaps I made a mistake in using the LW taboo words "I don't know". Really, how much is probably a function of how fine-grained you want the restoration from writing to be. Since I think it's reasonable to assume decreasing marginal utility from additional writing, I think a good estimate is that something like the first 10 pages of an autobiography are worth about the same as the following 100 pages (assuming a uniform distribution of information, so not the first 10 pages of a typical autobiography that might go in chronological order). The more you write the better the restoration will be. How good that restoration will actually turn out to be compared to, say, a cryonic restoration, is hard to know because we don't actually know how that will turn out either for sure, but obviously I think it will turn out to be pretty good.
Unfortunately people who can't afford cryonics are unlikely to have the time or resources to create meticulous records of themselves. When you consider the opportunity cost of creating such records, the actual materials needed, and the cost of preserving them reliably for at least several decades, it isn't obvious that this is much cheaper than cryonics.
There's also the problem that most people don't consider 'make a perfect copy of me' and 'bring me back to life' to be equivalent operations, and the ones who do are almost all Western intellectual types who could easily afford cryonics if they actually wanted to. The world’s poor almost all see their personal identity as tied to their physical body, so this kind of approach would seem pointless to them.
I agree with you here in that almost no one, especially the world's poor, will consider this a valid means of coming back to life. But, then, that's sort of the point. Depending on how you present it you can potentially get people to keep these kinds of writings even if they don't believe it will extend their lives in any meaningful way, and then they won't be completely lost because they didn't believe it was possible to come back from a biological death. And it lets those who do believe it will let them come back to life pursue their interest without hitting against social backlash.
Evidently. :)
This brings up a related point. How do you write your skills into the future? You can't just write "As of 2010 I was an excellent piano player".
But wait - maybe you can. If you're assuming a reconstruction technology which can uncompress verbal descriptions of behaviours into the much more complicated expression of such behaviours in terms of the neural substrate, then quite possibly this technology will also have massive general knowledge about human skills allowing it to uncompress such a statement into its equivalent in neural and muscular organization.
But then, what a temptation! As of 2010 I am not, in fact, able to play the piano, but if this record for the future can also serve as my letter to Santa, why not? It's not as if any of it is readily verifiable. I could say I like the taste of lemon when actually I hate it.
This line of thought isn't to ridicule the idea of writing yourself into the future - just to bring out some consequences the OP may not have thought about.
Of course this is a possibility. Even with cryonics, presumably if we have the technology to restore you then we'll have the technology to restore you with whatever modifications you'd like. The person you write into the future will be like you only insofar as you make them like you. If you choose to write someone like yourself but who is an excellent piano player into the future, so be it.
Cryonics appears to be the best hope for continuing a person's existence beyond physical death until other technologies provide better solutions. But despite its best-in-class status, cryonics has several serious downsides.
First and foremost, cryonics is expensive—well beyond a price that even a third of humanity can afford. Economies of scale may eventually bring the cost down, but in the mean time billions of people will die without the benefit of cryonics, and, even when the cost bottoms out, it will likely still be too expensive for people living at subsistence levels. Secondly, many people consider cryonics immoral or at least socially unacceptable, so even those who accept the idea of cryonics and want to pursue taking personal advantage of it are usually socially pressured out of signing up for cryonics. Combined, these two forces reduce the pool of people who will act to sign up for cryonics to be less than even a fraction of a percent of the human population.
Given that cryonics is effectively not an option for almost everyone on the planet, if we're serious about preserving lives into the future then we have to consider other options, especially ones that are morally and socially acceptable to most of humanity. Pushed by my own need to find an alternative to cryonics, I began trying to think of ways I could be restored after physical death.
If I am unable to preserve the physical components that currently make me up, it seems that the next best thing I can do is to record in some way as much of the details of the functioning of those physical components as possible. Since we don't yet have the brain emulation technology that would make cryonics irrelevant for the still living, I need a lower tech way to making a record of myself. And of all the ways I might try to record myself, none seems to better balance robustness, cost, and detail than writing.
Writing myself into the future—now we're on to something.
Here's some data on myself:
the one relationship in the world that is probably most often characterized by unquestioning, adoring love is that from parents to their children.
This is a good point. One problem with legal oppression of young people is that the age of majority varies from 16-21, but most people stop adoring their parents (and, technically, stop being children) in adolescence, age 11-13.
A good point, and in fact some modern societies do place the effective age of majority (if not the legal one) that low. I have a friend from Thailand who told me about his frustration with living in the US when he immigrated here at 16 to live with his aunt. Back home, he had moved out of his parent's home at 12 to attend a secondary school in Bangkok and was living on his own as much as any American college student does: still financially and socially tied fairly closely to his parents, but effectively independent. He had his own apartment, bought his own food and cooked his own meals, took care of his own transportation, bought his own clothes, etc.. When he came to the US he felt like he was a prisoner because he went from being an adult to a child in the matter of a single flight.
they can't consent to sexual relations.
That's seriously harsh. Not just the parents but the law deciding when you're allowed to have sex? No surprise that teenager's gain a reputation for rebelliousness.
Yes, the US is one of the more puritan "Christian" countries. In the US, two teenagers cannot have consensual sex together, by law. If they do have sex, they are both punished. (Some states have recently passed exceptions that tend to start at age 16-17, for couples that are of the same age. Even then, two 17 year old can have sex but an 18 year old can't have sex with a 17 year old because one's a major and the other one's a minor. Choose your mate's birthday carefully.)
As an aside, many US teens who took nude photos of themselves and gave them to their boy- or girlfriend have been charged with the high crime of distribution of child porn. Here is a report on one such Florida couple, aged 16 and 17, who were convicted (on the appeal, too). They kept the photos for themselves, but someone tipped off the police, the court record doesn't say who - possibly the parents. The appeal judge wrote in his opinion that one reason he wanted to punish them was that if left alone they might in the future sell their photos to child pornographers to make money.
The CNET article doesn't say what their punishment was, and anyway it was a random Google result out of at least dozens of similar cases, but I would imagine registration on the sex offender list for many years - which takes away a lot of rights no matter what your age - and jail time and/or probation and/or whatever they tend to give to 17 year old felons in Florida.
Just to be fair, although the child pornography laws are ridiculous (you want to make its production illegal, fine, but not its possession and distribution), some states have laws that make a little more sense when it comes to age of consent for sexual relations. In Florida (which I know only because I live there), a person under the age of 24 can have sex with a person who is at least 16 years of age legally. Of course, this still isn't that great because the law considers anyone under the age of 16 unable to consent (not listed in this statute), but at least it opens up a wide "grey area" that eliminates the majority of silly "rape" cases.
I agree with Julian completely but I would add the observation that there are no countries today with anything remotely resembling pure capitalism. Europe, the US, and the remainder of the traditional "west" are particularly far away from such an ideal.
Agreed. Really free markets were regulated away in the early 20th century, it what has always felt to me like a case of trying to trade stability for growth by preventing whatever caused massive volatility in the past from happening again.
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How many hours do you estimate you'll be putting into your autobiography for the resulting record to be "good enough"?
Next question, what is your hourly pay rate?
I see where this is going, so I'll go ahead and let you run an economic analysis on me. But, keep in mind that cost is not the only factor, only the main one for most of the world's population. For me it has far more to do with the social costs I would have to pay to sign up for cryonics.
That said, I estimate I'll be putting about 1 hour a week into writing myself into the future. I am currently paid at a rate of approximately $18 an hour. I'm not sure what my lifetime average pay rate will be, but let's go ahead and estimate it at $60 per hour in 2010 USD (I have two M.S. degrees, one in computer science and one in mathematics, and I'm willing to do work with questionable ethical outcomes, like "defense" contracting).