Revival Prizes

Cryonics is the process of having your body frozen when current medicine gives up on you, and calls you “dead”, in the hope of being revived later using much better future medicine. Even though cryonics has been available for many decades, and often receives free international publicity, only ~3000 people have signed up as customers, and only ~400 people have been frozen. I’m one of those customers. While many customers hope to have their current physical body fixed and restored to youthful health, I’m mainly hoping to be revived as an em, which seems to me a vastly easier (if still very hard) task.

Imagine you plan to become a cryonics patient, and hope for an eventual successful revival. Along this path many important decisions will need to be made: level of financial investment into the whole process, timing and method of preservation, method and place of storage, strategies of financial asset investment, and final timing and method of revival and reintegration into society. Through most of this process you will not be available to make key decisions, though after success you might be able to give an evaluation of the choices that were made on your behalf. So you will need to delegate many of these choices to agents who make these choices for you. How can you set up your relation to such agents to give them the best possible incentives to make good choices?

Several US states allow you to deposit money into a “trust”, which then can grow indefinitely by reinvestment without paying taxes on investment gains, even after you are officially dead. The usual legal process is to assign an “administrator” to manage the trust. Usually, you write down your preferences in words, and then pay this agent a constant percentage of your current assets to follow your instructions. In theory they do what you wanted out of fear of being sued. Unfortunately, its hard to prove a violation, and few would have the incentive to bother. This gives your agent the incentive to minimize all spending except reinvestment of the assets, or to divert spending or investments to parties who pay them a kickback. Either way, not a great system.

Here’s an improvement. Pay the agent only some fraction of the money left over in the fund after you are successfully revived. A prize for revival. Then they never get anything until you get what you wanted. Of course this requires some legal way to determine that you have in fact been revived. Instead of, for example, being replaced with some crude simulation of you. This approach seems better than the previous one, but there’s still the problem that this prize incentive makes them want to wait too long. Why risk any chance of failure, and why pay a high cost for revival, if you can just wait longer to raise the chance of success and lower the cost? So this agent will get it done eventually, but may wait too long. And they might not revive you they way you wanted.

One simple fix is that, once you are revived, you rate the whole process on a 0 to 100 scale, and your agent only gets that percentage of the max possible prize. (Maybe also guarantee that they get some min faction.) The rest of the prize can’t go to you, or your incentives are bad. So the rest of the prize would have to go to some specified charity, perhaps a pool of assets to help all other cryonics customers still not yet revived. Your agent will then try to make choices so that you will rate them highly after you are revived. You can expect them to choose a revival process where they give themselves advantages in convincing you that they did a good job. Perhaps even mind control. So steel yourself to be skeptical. They might also discretely threaten to “accidentally” lose you if you don’t pay them the full prize. So beware of that.

You might be able to do just a bit better by committing to a schedule by which the maximum prize your agent could win declines as a fraction of the total assets remaining after revival. Such a decline would encourage the agent to not wait too long to revive you. But if you don’t know the relevant rates of future change, how can you robustly define such a prize fraction decline? One robust measure available is the number of people who have been successfully revived so far. Your schedule of decline might not even start until at least one person has been revived, and then decline as some function of the number revived so far. Perhaps the function could be a simple power law. So you could specify how eager you are to be one of the first people revived.

So here’s my final proposal. You choose how much money to deposit in a trust, you write down your preferences as best you know them now, and you pick an agent who agrees to manage your trust, and make key storage and revival decisions. You agree to pay them some percent of current assets per year (preferably zero), and some max fraction of final remaining assets after revival to pay them as a prize. This max fraction follows some simple declining function of the number of people revived so far at that time. Perhaps a power law. And you have the discretion when revived to pay them less than this max value, with the remainder going to a specified charity. You initially choose the key parameters of this system to reflect your personal preferences, as best you can.

This is of course far from perfect. Problems remain, such as of kickbacks, theft, fake revival, and mind control. So there could be a place for a larger encompassing organization to watch out for and avoid such problems. And to publish stats on revivals and attempts so far. This larger organization could approve the basic range of reasonable options from which agents could choose at any one time, and have extra powers to monitor and overrule rogue agents. But it should mostly defer to the judgements of individual agents.

I can imagine a futarchy-based variation, where the “agent” is a pool of speculators who bet on shares of the final prize, conditional on making particular choices. This would cut the problem of random variation in the quality and even sanity of individual agents. But I can’t claim that futarchy is well enough tested now to make this a reasonable option if you are making these choices right now. However, I’d love to help a group do such testing, to see if it can become a viable option sooner.

Added 10:30a: It could also make sense to make your declining prize fraction function depend on the ratio of successful revivals so far to attempts that fail so badly as to make future revival seems impossible.