Seems like you’re right: If I run my script for calculating the costs & benefits of signing up for cryonics, but change the year for LEV to 2030, this indeed reduces the expected value to be negative for people of any age. Increasing the existential risk to 40% before 2035 doesn’t change the value to be net-positive.
The output of the script tells the user at which age to sign up, so I’ll report for which ages (and corresponding years) it’s rational to sign up.
For LEV 2030, person is now 30 years old: Not rational to sign up at any point in time
For LEV 2040, person is now 30 years old: Rational to sign up in 11-15 years (i.e. age 41-45, or from 2036 to 2040, with the value of signing up being <$10k).
For LEV 2050, person is now 30 years old: Rational to sign up now and stay signed up until 2050, value is maximized by signing up in 13 years, when it yields ~$45k.
All of this is based on fairly conservative assumptions on how good the future will be, e.g. the value of a lifeyear in the future is assumed not to be greater than the value of a lifeyear in 2025 in a western country, and it’s assumed that while aging will be eliminated, people will still die from accidents & suicide, driving the expected lifespan down to ~4k years. Additionally, I haven’t changed the 5% probability of resuscitation based on the fact that TAI might be soon & fairly powerful.
Good question!
Seems like you’re right: If I run my script for calculating the costs & benefits of signing up for cryonics, but change the year for LEV to 2030, this indeed reduces the expected value to be negative for people of any age. Increasing the existential risk to 40% before 2035 doesn’t change the value to be net-positive.
Assuming LEV happens in 2040 or 2050, does the expected value become net-positive or net-negative?
The output of the script tells the user at which age to sign up, so I’ll report for which ages (and corresponding years) it’s rational to sign up.
For LEV 2030, person is now 30 years old: Not rational to sign up at any point in time
For LEV 2040, person is now 30 years old: Rational to sign up in 11-15 years (i.e. age 41-45, or from 2036 to 2040, with the value of signing up being <$10k).
For LEV 2050, person is now 30 years old: Rational to sign up now and stay signed up until 2050, value is maximized by signing up in 13 years, when it yields ~$45k.
All of this is based on fairly conservative assumptions on how good the future will be, e.g. the value of a lifeyear in the future is assumed not to be greater than the value of a lifeyear in 2025 in a western country, and it’s assumed that while aging will be eliminated, people will still die from accidents & suicide, driving the expected lifespan down to ~4k years. Additionally, I haven’t changed the 5% probability of resuscitation based on the fact that TAI might be soon & fairly powerful.