“therefore recieve protection under the law in case your company goes bankrupt. In fact, you could instead estimate the year Congress passes a ‘right to not-death’ law which would protect your body in the event of a bankruptcy even before routine unfreezing, ”
I’m not entirely sure why you reach this conclusion. Demonstrating that a cryogenically frozen man is not dead is interesting news, but what would prompt the government to pass such a law? There are many people that can and do die without some drug or periodic medical treatment even now, yet there is no ‘right to not-death’ to protect them should they fall through the usual (limited) safety nets.
One possible mechanism would be a general social shift towards more cryogenics meaning cryo voters became an important voting block. Since most rational cryo-voters can be expected to be more-or-less single issue with respect to cryonics (almost nothing will increase your individual expected utility for a given level of money more than increasing your chance of being revivified), politicians will begin to face great pressure to appease this demographic. You’ll see that this is different to the situation you describe for at least three reasons:
On those issues where the individual utility gain is greatest, the population is smallest (cures for very rare genetic conditions which are unaffordable to the average person and yet not subsidised by the government). This is probably because it is not in the interests of politicians to use political capital on a very small sub-section of the population.
On those issues where individual utility gain is small and populations are large, the individuals concerned are unlikely to be single-issue. For example public health measures undoubtedly raise my lifetime utility, but do they do so more than public education, public art or nebulous concepts like ‘freedom’? Hard to say
On those issues where individual utility gain is large and populations are large, those populations are almost inevitably located in areas where US politicians have no incentive to help them. For example, campaigning to end malaria would be both massively important and affect a huge number of people, but those people would not be US voters.
If this social shift occurs, politicians may be incentivised to offer a ‘government guarentee’ to all frozen corpsicles, in the same way all mortage lenders are government-backed or banks are unable to go bust in an uncontrolled way (assets up to a certain value are protected). So it wouldn’t so much be a ‘not-death’ right (because all three groups I describe above would still fail to be protected from death), but I was using it as a shorthand for the slightly more complex scenario I describe here.
I don’t know how likely I think this scenario is, but I think if it is going to happen, it will happen before a post-scarcity society. In the interests of being charitable to the cryogenics companies, I think it is fair to point out that this is a mechanism that could greatly improve their chance of being revivified without any technological innovation.
“therefore recieve protection under the law in case your company goes bankrupt. In fact, you could instead estimate the year Congress passes a ‘right to not-death’ law which would protect your body in the event of a bankruptcy even before routine unfreezing, ”
I’m not entirely sure why you reach this conclusion. Demonstrating that a cryogenically frozen man is not dead is interesting news, but what would prompt the government to pass such a law? There are many people that can and do die without some drug or periodic medical treatment even now, yet there is no ‘right to not-death’ to protect them should they fall through the usual (limited) safety nets.
One possible mechanism would be a general social shift towards more cryogenics meaning cryo voters became an important voting block. Since most rational cryo-voters can be expected to be more-or-less single issue with respect to cryonics (almost nothing will increase your individual expected utility for a given level of money more than increasing your chance of being revivified), politicians will begin to face great pressure to appease this demographic. You’ll see that this is different to the situation you describe for at least three reasons:
On those issues where the individual utility gain is greatest, the population is smallest (cures for very rare genetic conditions which are unaffordable to the average person and yet not subsidised by the government). This is probably because it is not in the interests of politicians to use political capital on a very small sub-section of the population.
On those issues where individual utility gain is small and populations are large, the individuals concerned are unlikely to be single-issue. For example public health measures undoubtedly raise my lifetime utility, but do they do so more than public education, public art or nebulous concepts like ‘freedom’? Hard to say
On those issues where individual utility gain is large and populations are large, those populations are almost inevitably located in areas where US politicians have no incentive to help them. For example, campaigning to end malaria would be both massively important and affect a huge number of people, but those people would not be US voters.
If this social shift occurs, politicians may be incentivised to offer a ‘government guarentee’ to all frozen corpsicles, in the same way all mortage lenders are government-backed or banks are unable to go bust in an uncontrolled way (assets up to a certain value are protected). So it wouldn’t so much be a ‘not-death’ right (because all three groups I describe above would still fail to be protected from death), but I was using it as a shorthand for the slightly more complex scenario I describe here.
I don’t know how likely I think this scenario is, but I think if it is going to happen, it will happen before a post-scarcity society. In the interests of being charitable to the cryogenics companies, I think it is fair to point out that this is a mechanism that could greatly improve their chance of being revivified without any technological innovation.