X-Message-Number: 11295
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 11:45:34 +0100
From:  (John de Rivaz)
Subject: Re: ethics and lovable relatives

Another point on the question of ethics and lovable relatives is the 
distribution of wealth. If a family has a given amount of wealth it is often 
that only one or two members of that family actually generated it and the 
rest have just basked in it.

If the entire family is resurrected, then who gets the wealth? Maybe the 
earners feel that they may not be able to and/or want to earn in the future. 
Whoever gets to the future may not want the rest there to share.

First you save your life and then you worry about this, but maybe the reason 
lots of people worry about and reject cryonics is that these issues are at 
the back of their minds. At the moment this problem makes a large portion of 
the wealth of the legal "industry" - settling family disputes and divorces. 
In the TV series "Dynasty" Blake Carrington lost everything once or twice, 
but just took the attitude that he had generated a vast fortune once, so he 
could do it again.

But many people who generate vast fortunes may be only too aware that that 
there was an element of luck there - being at the right place at the right 
time and knowing the right people. Such luck may not occur again. I wonder 
if Bill Gates has considered being tranported 100 years into the future with 
nothing and whether he could develop the technology of the day into another 
Microsoft? I suspect that if a time traveller were to exterminate him before 
he got into computers, someone else would have created a very similar 
company in the ensuing alternative universe. 

It is the nature of a ubiquitous computer that it has to have an operating 
system, and it is much more convenient if all computers have the same 
operating system. The Microsoft monopoly *has* to exist. It is highly likely 
that similar monopolies will appear with nanotechnology assemblers and 
replicators, unless possibly the world takes the Linux route. But nano is 
likely to be too heavily regulated for a Linux to appear. The battle between 
Windows and Linux is going to be very interesting. If anything brings 
Microsoft down it will be Linux, not the lawyers.

A bit far from "lovable relatives" perhaps, but the future of economics is 
of importance to cryonicists and this subject. A linux type future, where 
people are contributing to society doing something they want to for fun, may 
be preferable to a wage driven economy. Such an economy could be where 
manufactured goods may be dirt cheap but people are driven to earn by a need 
to buy services that don't fill physical needs but which are necessary to 
keep them out of prison.

-- 
Sincerely, John de Rivaz
Homepage:         http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JohndeR
Longevity Report: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Sauna/3748/lr.htm
Fractal Report:   http://www.longevb.demon.co.uk/fr.htm 
PCS - a  Singles listing sheet for people in Cornwall
                  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JohndeR/pcs.htm

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11295