Expensive, But Will It Stay That Way?

A long time ago (although I'm sure I was far from the first person to do so -- others have now written novels based on the premise), I started musing about the possibilities of "saving" Social Security by figuring out how to upload consciousnesses into virtual environments and offering retirees a choice:

1. Live for a few more years while continuing to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits and the standard of living they imply; or
2. Have their consciousnesses uploaded into a virtual environment and live forever in luxury.

The idea being that, at some point, the costs of uploading and consciousness/environmentment maintenance would be so much lower than the costs of meatspace benefits that the whole thing would go from the largest government expenditure to a rounding error in government budgets, as well as providing other benefits -- more living space, less traffic congestion, less scarcity of physical goods, etc. -- to those still living in meatspace.

At the moment, the cost equation seems to be nowhere near anything like a balance point.

According to DeepSeek V3.1 Thinking (via Yupp, and yes, that is an affiliate/referral link), the costs as of now, with "mature tech" (if it existed), would run anywhere from $5-10 million per "upload," and another $100k-$500k per year for maintainance, in perpetuity.

According to Microsoft CoPilot, the average per capita cost of Social Security and Medicare is about $35,000 per year, for an average varying from 16.1 years to 21.5 years depending on the age the recipient starts taking the benefits. Going with even the lowest age, that's less than $600k total.

So it seems unlikely that the tech will be here at all* before Social Security crashes and burns, and even more unlikely that the costs of deploying that tech could be brought down to a competitive level in that time frame.

Kind of a buzz-crusher for writers who want to set believable novels in that environment featuring characters with characteristics -- experience sets, social mores, etc. -- familiar to current readers.

But some good ones have tried and, IMO, succeeded. Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (not an affiliate link) tries to deal realistically with the problems involved and tells an absorbing story. He's great at achieving reader suspension of disbelief in the darnedest scenarios.

And who knows? We've seen continuing acceleration of technological development ever since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Lots of things are cheap now that were expensive a decade or three ago and non-existent before that. Maybe the cost projections are high by several orders of magnitude.

* When I say the tech won't be here "at all," I mean in form that is both reproducible and convincing. We're already seeing chatbots built from records of deceased individuals, and from what I hear those chatbots can inspire some perception of verisimilitude in the loved ones they "talk" with, but I don't think anyone believes those chatbots are the people they copy, or are able to "think," "feel," etc. as ... personalities. I suspect that within the next decade, some dead billionaire will have arranged an attempt at "upload," and that if it does seemingly succeed we'll be in for years of arguments, including legal arguments, over whether the resulting electronic entity is indeed "him" or "her."