There's the Cantonese saying: you can't bring money into your casket. Therefore the notion of Die With Zero, the attitude that you should spend all the fruits of your labor within your lifetime.

It makes sense for most people, where money is nothing more than a slave that serves them. But, failure of imagination to me would look like spending all your money on food before you die.

For the sake of inversion I want to consider the scenario where money can be larger than that; a portfolio has an agency of its own, outlives the original owner and continue to carry out his agenda.

Existing long-living money

This is not far-fetched. The most vanilla manifestation of this is a simple trust fund. You tell the lawyer where your money should go after you're death, and he carries it out with pen and paper. The business logic is usually exceedingly simple.

A few levels up from that are philanthropic foundations. The source of money isn't as straightforward; the business logic isn't as clear; and they are run by collective of humans at a high cost.

Nobel and various prizes are a subset of that, where they seek to incentivize desirable achievements that are insufficiently rewarded by the free-market.

And then there's family offices. Think of it like a private kingdom managed by fund managers with constitutions that family members have to abide by. This is to fight the trend of family wealth being squandered within three generations.

Clearly these are solutions meant for the top 0.001% of the population, why even bother. But I think technology is slowly coming to a point where alternative ways to create a portfolio-that-outlives-you is within grasp of the top 5%.

But why

First let's examine why doing so is appealing. A common act of dismissal would be "you've got so much money, you can't spend it all, just leave a stupid will." But try think of assets beyond utility in philanthropy or heritage.

Given the free will, portfolio of assets can be made to continue to your stories you want to tell after you're gone.

It can be used continue to push the agendas that take multiple generations to complete.

Capital can be used to fight recurring bad ideas that future generations would have forgotten is a real bad idea (Soviet communism).

Conservations of all kinds. Not just environment and trees, but films, games, music rights and all manner of cultural artifacts.

It's not hard to imagine something for the money to take care of if you've got a pursuit that is larger than yourself.

Let's consider solutions

Now that we have blockchains to handle programmable money, the foundation is laid for a portfolio that runs itself.

A DAO is straightforward parallel to a meatspace philanthropic foundation. Capital allocation decisions are still largely human-made, but all these at a substantially lower cost. You just have to pick one that you're ideologically aligned with. The tricky thing is knowing they will continue to run for a long time.

Ready Player One demonstrated a treasure hunt as way of inheritance to the most deserving person. A posthumous treasure hunt is an elaborate dead man's switch. There's no reason why it must have only one winner. The mechanics of the hunt (or any game at all) can be tweaked to solve for the ideals you are looking for. Say you'd like to reward original human-produced literature (free of LLM-tampering), your money could become the automated version of Pulitzer.

Daniel Suarez's Daemon is a demonstration of if-this-then-that in posthumous capital allocation. Its ideas have been used in Person of Interest where humans are employed by bots to do its bidding.

In a post-LLM world and cryptocurrency, this has become much more achievable.

Design considerations

I'm far from having this down, but I can think of a few heuristics to consider if we have to design such a mechanism.

Keep it simple. A dumb-as-a-brick trust fund is real simple, a human lawyer can execute it and not go wrong. When boiled down as a code it probably costs two lines. But for something to behave as smart as you are, chances of it going amok would be exponentially high. Simplicity is easier said than to test for.

Think about how much agency should the portfolio has. In other words how smart should it be on its own. If human decisions are in the loop, operation cost goes up, there are chances of human corruption over time.

Alfred Nobel delegated this to a committee of people to decide who to reward prizes to. Somehow the quality of this committee remains largely respectable. Can yours portfolio recruit a good enough committee in 80 years? If it cannot afford to, can it make similarly good decisions on its own?

Consider how long should this portfolio be alive for. The things to account for in 500 years might be a lot more than one that's designed for 200 years. In a long enough time horizon, nothing can be assumed to stay constant. Don't assume nation/states continue to be a thing; quantum computing might be the norm; common codes may not be Turing complete; you can't even assume all humans can read in 300 years.

Suppose a portfolio is given full autonomy, in a that a digital replica that thinks like you is in control of the assets (this is not far off now; even I have enough written material for an LLM to emulate me). Can the decision-making engine withstand ideological updates? Will it continue to allocate capital based on your philosophies today, or can it adapt for progressive ideas in the future? If it does, is it capable of sticking to core principles without turning woke?

Perhaps you program it with a set of prime directives, which consists of three to five core values. How do you know what goes in there is the right set of supreme values? Even if you can pull that off, what does the machine do when one directive contradicts another?

Conclusion

Perhaps this would end up to be a product category that has yet to be imagined. I can picture solutions on future shelves that started off looking like financial products, slowly morphing into solutions for immortality-designs.