(Roughly) Daily

The marvelous Matt Levine on one of the vexing challenges facing those who preserve themselves cryogenically…

See, if you go to a regular trusts and estates lawyer, she will ask you questions like “if your spouse and children die before you, whom do you want to inherit your estate,” but if you go to a science fiction trusts and estates lawyer, she will ask you questions like “if your frozen head cannot be attached to a fresh body and reanimated in 200 years, but your consciousness can be cloned in a computer simulation, would you like your estate to go to the cloned consciousness or stay with the frozen head?” Meanwhile I suppose if you go to a regular financial planner, he will ask you questions like “how much equity risk are you comfortable taking between now and retirement,” while if you go to a science fiction financial planner, he will ask you questions like “where are you most comfortable investing for the next 200 years, given that you will not be able to change your asset allocation decisions during that time, because you’ll be dead?”

When you are a kid, science fiction is fun because it imagines amazing futuristic technologies. And then you grow up and you realize that what’s really fun are the legal and financial technologies that are called into being by those physical technologies: Sure sure sure reviving a frozen head is great, but how does the frozen head get a credit card? Bloomberg’s Erin Schilling reports:

Estate attorneys are creating trusts aimed at extending wealth until people who get cryonically preserved can be revived, even if it’s hundreds of years later. These revival trusts are an emerging area of law built on a tower of assumptions. Still, they’re being taken seriously enough to attract true believers and merit discussion at industry conferences.

“The idea of cryopreservation has gone from crackpot to merely eccentric,” said Mark House, an estate lawyer who works with Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s largest cryonics facility with 1,400 members and about 230 people already frozen. “Now that it’s eccentric, it’s kind of in vogue to be interested in it.”

He and others are trying to answer questions that at times seem more like prompts in a philosophy class.

Can money live indefinitely?

Are you dead if your body is cryonically preserved?

Are you considered revived if you have only your brain?

And if you’re revived, are you the same person?

So many good legal questions — “House considers the revived person to be different in the eyes of the law, in part because a person can’t be the beneficiary of their own trusts” — but also great financial ones.

Here’s one: Should you buy Bitcoin for your long sleep? The argument for Bitcoin is that you can hold it, indefinitely, without relying on anyone else: If you put 10 Bitcoin in a wallet and only you know the private key, and then you die and get frozen and come back in 200 years, no one will have taken your Bitcoin, legal rules about inheritance and perpetual trusts don’t matter, and you don’t need some succession plan for the trustees and financial advisers who will take care of your assets. You just have to make sure you remember your private key as you’re dying. Legal rules can change, human institutions can change, but your Bitcoin is immutable.

The argument against Bitcoin is, of course, what if people stop valuing Bitcoin? Putting your money in Bitcoin is a hedge against change in other human institutions, but it puts a lot of eggs in the basket of one human institution, “treating Bitcoin as money.” It’s a bit weird to bet that that’s more permanent than anything else.

More generally, what is money anyway? “It may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world,” says OpenAI to its investors, and what if OpenAI gets to artificial general intelligence before anyone gets around to unfreezing the heads? You might be leaving your future self all the wrong stuff…

Very long-term planning: “Cryogenics Law,” from @matt_levine via Ingrid Burrington’s wonderful newsletter, “Perfect Sentences” (in this instance, “Sure sure sure reviving a frozen head is great, but how does the frozen head get a credit card?).

* Marcus Tullius Cicero

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As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that the coldest (natural) temperature ever recorded on Earth was registered by the research station at Vostok, Antarctica: -128.5 degrees Fahrenheit (-89.2 degrees Celsius).

We might also note that today– July 20, 2024– is the date on which the action in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower begins: “…in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed…”