This idea of a “suicide mortgage” that @ctrlcreep came up with is fascinating. They expanded the concept on Tumblr:

“Death is not as easy as deleting a file: the powers that be work to preserve, do not grant you root access to your self, insist that you persist even as they chide you for burdening the system, move you to welfare servers, and ration your access to escapism. […] Euthanasia permits are the only way out, but their price is steep […] Under suicide mortgages, [exploitative] corporations sponsor swarms of copies, who work non-stop, pooling their wages to buy up euthanasia permits. Permits are then raffled off, and the winning copy meets death far sooner than would have otherwise been possible. Somebody who says his suicide mortgage is 5% paid means that 5% of his copies have earned oblivion.”

The appeal of this system to the “buyer” of the mortgage — who is a fully digitized person, which is why they’re unable to die in the first place — is that they might get to be the first copy deleted. However, intuitively, as the pool of copies working together gets smaller, they earn less, and it takes longer to buy the next euthanasia permit. Eventually the mortgage isn’t sufficiently useful anymore, and maybe each remaining copy arranges for its own suicide mortgage. The original digital self’s clones proliferate again.

Of course, there’s a hole in this idea: why use digitized selves for labor in the first place? In a future where we’ve figured out how to upload humans, we’ve certainly also figured out how to make artificially intelligent algorithms and scripts and programs, etc, etc. Maybe there’s some kind of draconian intellectual property regime that makes it more expensive to use AI than digitized human laborers? That seems fitting.

I’m sure there’s a startup in this imagined ecosystem trying to disrupt the suicide mortgage financiers. Let’s root for them, I guess.