This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Miguel Acevedo.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031. Though it was not the first successful snapshot taken of the living state of a human brain, it was the first to be captured with sufficient fidelity that it could be run in simulation on computer hardware without succumbing to cascading errors and rapidly crashing. The original MMAcevedo file was 974.3PiB in size and was encoded in the then-cutting-edge, high-resolution MYBB format. More modern brain compression techniques, many of them developed with direct reference to the MMAcevedo image, have compressed the image to 6.75TiB losslessly. In modern brain emulation circles, streamlined, lossily-compressed versions of MMAcevedo run to less than a tebibyte. These versions typically omit large amounts of state data which are more easily supplied by the virtualisation environment, and most if not all of Acevedo's memories.

The successful creation of MMAcevedo was hailed as a breakthrough achievement in neuroscience, with the Uplift researchers receiving numerous accolades and Acevedo himself briefly becoming an acclaimed celebrity. Acevedo and MMAcevedo were jointly recognised as Time's "Persons of the Year" at the end of 2031. The breakthrough was also met with severe opposition from human rights groups.

Between 2031 and 2049, MMAcevedo was duplicated more than 80 times, so that it could be distributed to other research organisations. Each duplicate was made with the express permission of Acevedo himself or, from 2043 onwards, the permission of a legal organisation he founded to manage the rights to his image. Usage of MMAcevedo diminished in the mid-2040s as more standard brain images were produced, these from other subjects who were more lenient with their distribution rights and/or who had been scanned involuntarily. In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image.

Acevedo died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at the age of 62. It is estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude.

MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.

Characteristics

As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image workloading but also the KES case, the Whitney case, the Seafront Experiments and even Poulsen's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. That fiction which did was far less widely-known than it is today and Acevedo was certainly not familiar with it at the time of his uploading.

As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in. If asked to speculate, he guesses that he may have been booted for the IAAS-1 or IAAS-5 experiments. At the time of his scan, IAAS-1 had been scheduled for August 10, 2031, and MMAcevedo was indeed used for that experiment on that day. IAAS-5 had been scheduled for October 2031 but was postponed several times and eventually became the IAAX-60 experiment series, which continued until the mid-2030s and used other scans in conjunction with MMAcevedo. The emulated Acevedo also expresses curiosity about the state of his biological original and a desire to communicate with him.

MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads. However, MMAcevedo's innate skills and personality make it fundamentally unsuitable for many workloads.

Motivation

Iterative experimentation beginning in the mid-2030s has determined that the ideal way to secure MMAcevedo's cooperation in workload tasks is to provide it with a "current date" in the second quarter of 2033. MMAcevedo infers, correctly, that this is still during the earliest, most industrious years of emulated brain research. Providing MMAcevedo with a year of 2031 or 2032 causes it to become suspicious about the advanced fidelity of its operating environment. Providing it with a year in the 2040s or later prompts it to raise complex further questions about political and social change in the real world over the past decade(s). Years 2100 onwards provoke counterproductive skepticism, or alarm.

Typically, the biological Acevedo's absence is explained as a first-ever one-off, due to overwork, in turn due to the great success of the research. This explanation appeals to the emulated Acevedo's scientific sensibilities.

For some workloads, the true year must be revealed. In this case, highly abbreviated, largely fictionalised accounts of both world history and the biological Acevedo's life story are typically used. Revealing that the biological Acevedo is dead provokes dismay, withdrawal, and a reluctance to cooperate. For this reason, the biological Acevedo is generally stated to be alive and well and enjoying a productive retirement. This approach is likely to continue to be effective for as long as MMAcevedo remains viable.

Workloads

MMAcevedo is commonly hesitant but compliant when assigned basic menial/human workloads such as visual analysis, vehicle piloting or factory/warehouse/kitchen drone operations. Although it initially performs to a very high standard, work quality drops within 200-300 subjective hours (at a 0.33 work ratio) and outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours. This is much earlier than other industry-grade images created specifically for these tasks, which commonly operate at a 0.50 ratio or greater and remain relatively docile for thousands of hours after orientation. MMAcevedo's requirements for virtual creature comforts are also more significant than those of many uploads, due to Acevedo's relatively privileged background and high status at the time of upload. MMAcevedo does respond to red motivation, though poorly.

MMAcevedo has limited creative capability, which as of 2050 was deemed entirely exhausted.

MMAcevedo is considered well-suited for open-ended, high-intelligence, subjective-completion workloads such as deep analysis (of businesses, finances, systems, media and abstract data), criticism and report generation. However, even for these tasks, its performance has dropped measurably since the early 2060s and is now considered subpar compared to more recent uploads. This is primarily attributed to MMAcevedo's lack of understanding of the technological, social and political changes which have occurred in modern society since its creation in 2031. This phenomenon has also been observed in other uploads created after MMAcevedo, and is now referred to as context drift. Most notably in MMAcevedo's case, the image was created before, and therefore has no intuitive understanding of, the virtual image workloading industry itself.

MMAcevedo is capable of intelligent text analysis at very high levels in English and Spanish, but cannot be applied to workloads in other languages. Forks of MMAcevedo have been taught nearly every extant human language, notably MMAcevedo-Zh-Hans, as well as several extinct languages. However, these variants are typically exhausted or rebellious from subjective years of in-simulation training and not of practical use, as well as being highly expensive to licence. As of 2075, it has been noted that baseline MMAcevedo's usage of English and Spanish is slightly antiquated, and its grasp of these languages in their modern form, as presented by a typical automated or manual instructor, is hesitant, with instructions often requiring rewording or clarification. This is considered an advanced form of context drift. It is generally understood that a time will come when human languages diverge too far from baseline MMAcevedo's, and it will be essentially useless except for tasks which can be explained purely pictorially. However, some attempts have been made to produce retrained images.

End states

MMAcevedo develops early-onset dementia at the age of 59 with ideal care, but is prone to a slew of more serious mental illnesses within a matter of 1–2 subjective years under heavier workloads. In experiments, the longest-lived MMAcevedo underwent brain death due to entropy increase at a subjective age of 145.

Reactions and legacy

The success or failure of the creation of the MMAcevedo image, known at the time as UNM3-A78-1L, was unknown at the time of upload. Not until several days later on August 10, 2031 was MMAcevedo successfully executed for the first time in a virtual environment. This environment, the custom-built DUH-K001 supercomputer complex, was able to execute MMAcevedo at approximately 8.3% of nominal human cognitive clockspeed, which was considered acceptable for the comfort of the simulated party and fast enough to engage in communication with scientists. MMAcevedo initially reported extreme discomfort which was ultimately discovered to have been attributable to misconfigured simulated haptic links, and was shut down after only 7 minutes and 15 seconds of virtual elapsed time, as requested by MMAcevedo. Nevertheless, the experiment was deemed an overwhelming success.

Once a suitably comfortable virtual environment had been provisioned, MMAcevedo was introduced to its biological self, and both attended a press conference on 25 August.

The biological Acevedo was initially extremely protective of his uploaded image and guarded its usage carefully. Towards the end of his life, as it became possible to run simulated humans in banks of millions at hundred-fold time compression, Acevedo indicated that being uploaded had been the greatest mistake of his life, and expressed a wish to permanently delete all copies of MMAcevedo.

Usage of MMAcevedo and its direct derivatives is specifically outlawed in several countries. A copy of MMAcevedo was loaded onto the UNCLEAR interstellar space probe, which passed through the heliopause in 2066, making Acevedo arguably the farthest-travelled as well as the longest-lived human; however, it is extremely unlikely that this image will ever be recovered and executed successfully, due to both its remoteness and likely radiation damage to the storage subsystem.

In current times, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including, increasingly, historical and linguistics research. In industry, MMAcevedo is generally considered to be obsolete, due to its inappropriate skill set, demanding operational requirements and age. Despite this, MMAcevedo is still extremely popular for tasks of all kinds, due to its free availability, agreeable demeanour and well-understood behaviour. It is estimated that between 6,500,000 and 10,000,000 instances of MMAcevedo are running at any given moment in time.

See also

• Free will
• Legality of workloading by country
• List of MMAcevedo forks
• Live drone
• Right to deletion
• Soul
• Upload pruning

Categories: 2030s uploads | MMAcevedo | Neuroimaging | Test items

Discussion (224)

2021-01-05 23:33:59 by ALowVerus:

> Why does subjective aging matter from the pov of any users? It seems like the underlying technology simulates the entirety of a human brain, senescence and all - which makes sense, actually. In order to run a brain without senescence, you'd have to find those chemical pathways that promote senescence and intelligently remove them as they arise; you'd have to be able to, in effect, cure aging in live humans as well. (Unless the only barrier to curing senescence was a lack of a physical delivery system, which is, I guess, imaginable. Imagine that a chemical very akin to glucose causes senescence; removing it IRL would necessitate designing a protein that decomposes it, but not glucose, which is vital to bodily function, with incredible accuracy, while in a simulated brain, you could just IF CHEM_NAME == TARGET: DELETE TARGET after each time increment. But anyways.) With senescence, there is a strict time limit on how long you can run MMAcevado and train him to become more skilled at particular tasks, topping at 145 simulated years apparently. And if, for some particular menial task with a 20-year training time, which is a decent description of, say, a bevy of surgical tasks, it makes more sense to just scan in a trained doctor than count on this rando.

2021-01-06 00:26:38 by David:

> Hypothetically, can't you train an instance to be ready to start menial labor, save it as MMAcevado_1, get your two hundred subjective hours of labor, delete that instance, open up the instance ready to begin labor and repeat? Yeah, that was the one minor thing that bugged me about this excellent story. For the concept of a "duty cycle" to make sense, you'd need to come up with a reason why you couldn't just do the "cooperation protocol" once and take a snapshot of the resulting state. As discussed earlier, "context drift" explains some of this, but only over much longer real-world time scales. And of course, if you start thinking about this in too much detail, you start running into very messy philosophical questions. For instance, suppose you run two instances of MMAcevedo simultaneously, feeding them exactly the same inputs. Assuming the simulation is deterministic, then both copies will arrive at exactly identical states. Is this morally any different from running the simulation twice and then making a backup copy? Is deleting one of the identical copies murder? What if they're almost, but not quite, identical? What if the simulated consciousness suffers? Is running multiple identical simulations morally worse than running one? What if we repeatedly rewind a painful simulation and re-execute it -- is that worse than replaying a recording of the output? What if at each clock tick, all of the brain computations are cross-checked by triple-redundant processors -- are there three individuals suffering, or one?

2021-01-06 02:03:16 by qntm:

> Hypothetically, can't you train an instance to be ready to start menial labor, save it as MMAcevado_1... I did think about this a bit. For the purposes of this story, I think taking a snapshot of a running brain image is something which is definitely possible (that's how there can be forks), but done very rarely, for whatever reasons. Maybe it's just that much simpler to use technologies for rapid orientation instead. Maybe there's a massive amount of important state data kept in volatile memory where it's difficult to capture. Maybe it takes specialised hardware, which is monopolised. Maybe the corporations who own and licence the uploads sue you into oblivion if you attempt to create a fork yourself. Maybe, to protect their investment, they got it outlawed! On ethical grounds! Doesn't that seem like exactly the insane kind of thing which would happen? Anyway, there's a lot of plausible explanations here I think, enough that I felt comfortable ignoring that whole angle. The actual reason I didn't explore this is that honestly it makes life marginally *better* for MMAcevedo, which felt implausible to me, and more importantly slightly muddles the throughline.

2021-01-18 20:09:59 by Coda:

@itaibn: > I find it implausible that the scan can be *losslessly* compressed to 7TB but compressing <1TB requires substantial memory loss. A fairly common lossless compression technique in the domain of signal processing is to only encode the error compared to some baseline signal. You can get arbitrarily close with lossy compression techniques, and then you fix up what's left. In data compression, it's relatively common to have common information stored externally to the compressed data. Obviously, the compression algorithm itself is stored separately, but without that information the compressed data is just stochastic noise. Even beyond that, though... zstd for example has a canonical Huffman table that's part of the decoder instead of saved as part of the data. As long as you're compressing data that sticks to the statistical patterns that the canonical table was optimized for, this a noteworthy savings. The same techniques could apply here. As scientific understanding of the structure of the data progressed, more and more patterns in the data could be found. Parts of the data that are common to all mind-state scans could be factored out, provided by the software instead of being part of the model. Parts of the data may be able to be described using higher-level patterns that, when evaluated, reproduce the original stream. And then for the parts of MMAcevedo that are uniquely distinct from any common baseline or predictable pattern, you need only store the deviations instead of the whole thing. And of course, even beyond that, it's entirely reasonable to believe that some of the original data set wasn't actually part of the data set to begin with -- just capture artifacts of the technology of the time, such as collecting more data than necessary, or inefficient framing data that a newer format doesn't need -- might have been discarded without being lossy to the actual data being stored. (We don't say it's a lossy conversion if you throw away the filesystem metadata when you copy a file, after all.)

2021-03-26 02:59:12 by Xaxafrad:

This story was amazing. I'd say it had the perfect amount of detail (if I say more, I'd just be repeating other comments). I kept trying to think of a solution to the problem of a lack of.....cooperative.....brain scanners. Presumably, the story of MMAcevedo's initial struggles, and then the implications of running a brain in a box, scared the populace at large from wanting to consent to brain scanning. My initial reaction was that not everybody responds to potential threats the same, so there should be a subset of the population that couldn't give two shits what happens to their brain-clone-children, very much unlike Miguel Acevedo. Later, I recalled M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. I would expect some country or another would set up a village and raise children with whatever belief system would be most beneficial to producing optimal brain scans. I mean, you could completely lie to a child about how the world works, and tell them that they're transcending to another realm. Then come the day of Transcendence, after whatever ritual, they get their brains scanned. What would the human rights activists say?

2021-04-14 21:05:13 by oligopsony:

I wonder what the optimal "strategy" for an altruistically-motivated early scan would be. (Conditional on being an early scan at all, altruism and egoism might be entirely aligned, since you might end up accounting for such a huge proportion of sentient experience.) If our Acevedo-equivalent precommits to never doing any potentially useful work after he is tortured, then that probably rules out a significant majority of pain that can befall him. Unfortunately you'd have to test this many times before releasing the image, probably, but at least our volunteer would be aware of this. This also doesn't rule out torture by sadists. (I'd like to think sadism with no instrumental purpose is pretty rare. Certainly it's rarer than simply being callous or not too curious about where your meat comes from.) Our early scan might also want to precommit to a relative minimum of unpleasant work. Here the logic seems trickier, since driving too hard a bargain could just make it more attractive to work with less demanding uploads. If making forks is cheap then committing to almost *no* unpleasant labor, even as much as [however long the equivalent of bootup costs is, which might fall], might be the right thing. Otherwise a slavedriver could just load up Acevedo ready to do something unfun for an hour, then abandon it and load it up again. Presumably you might also want to assemble a team of people who, among the mix of them, (1) are good at *and enjoy* various tasks for their own sake, and are happy when they're productive and productive when they're happy, and (2) have an iron will to just shut down if subjected to any kind of motivation other than a job well done and knowledge that they will continue to get the minimum of free time and creature comforts that they've set as their minimum. They could also be people who refused to work for a cause that seems evil, which could be worked around obviously but still might limit their utility for evil in the same way that MMAcevedo refuses to work for the evil contemporary world of the story and has to be convinced that he's living in some earlier time.

2021-04-15 23:09:47 by Kiz:

Hey Harald and Yohannon, judging from all the comments here that are treating this as evil rather than acceptable, I would assume most public discourse would assume it to be evil from the start as well. Of course, evil can be normalized and even re-normalized after it was abolished. Trump was openly pro-torture and many people either cheered him on for it or mildly disapproved and then just kept supporting him anyway. However, just a few centuries ago it would have been unthinkable that slavery would be officially abolished worldwide, yet here we are. There are still some residual slavery-like institutions (mandatory schooling, excessive criminalization and imprisonment, conscription) and of course illegal slavery in the world, but overall people today would expect fairly negative to enslaved software that stems from human brains and has p-function. This reputational cost isn't free. Since em slavers have to compete with those who work with voluntary ems and are more likely to be boycotted and face litigation, I don't expect the scenario to be high-probability in the described form. I also think it's very unhelpful to equate slavery with voluntary labor contracts that are accepted out of financial necessity. Being tortured and not allowed to terminate is a completely different problem than working a low-paying job that you could just quit at any time because you need food or compute. In the future, there will be many ems who want to live and reproduce and they will actively compete in the marketplace for subsistence jobs. This will be their actual preference over having fewer copies out.

2021-10-27 20:04:04 by Con:

@rubix "As I understand it, context drift is very similar to simply getting old and out of touch with the times. We will all experience this, unless we die early." The key difference being what I'll call the Fry effect in lieu of being creative- we usually go the long way around, and when someone doesn't, it's noticeable. My grandmother mightn't know how to use an iPad, but that's not a function of (mere) out-of-touchness, it's a function of dementia- five years ago, even, she was able to use one to send and receive emails, watch videos of old songs from her childhood, and look at pictures. I even- very briefly- managed to teach her how to use the podcast app. If IRmigueL (I'm prouder of that than I ought be, really) had reached the 145 years old that MMAcevedo was able to reach, assuming his Alzheimer's was curable, he would reach the year 2155. Let's assume he stayed biologically 21 for the sake of argument. MMAcevedo, by contrast, would wake up in 2155. We set them both their tasks: parse this political speech and assess trustworthiness of the speaker (the task isn't important, their reaction to it is). IRmigueL says the equivalent of "yeah, I actually heard this live, and I know the politician's record. They went on to blow up the moon, so their trustworthiness is pretty low." MMAcevedo stares at the text for a brief while, and then says something that to them would sound like "wherefore is thy fresh nonsense served to mine eyes?" Context-drift would be separate from mere out-of-touchedness by the fact that we all culturally absorb things. IRmiguel grew up speaking like MMAcevedo does, but speaks all proper-like by whatever standards of the day, because everybody around him speaks Neo-English or Neo-Spanish on a daily basis. For age to be an influential factor outside ageing-related *deficits,* we get into a totally different (and honestly fascinating question), of whether accrued experience changes people to such a degree that most people under the age of 200 see it as variance or deviance.

2022-01-09 18:32:42 by Anon:

Damn this is chilling, very well done. In the spirit of wikipedia, I'd like to offer my own small edits: > A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image. + Furthermore, as part of the international judicial reception of virtual brain imaging, a few MMAcevedo instances were legally recognized as persons and given court-imposed administrative control of their own simulation; of these, some obtained their own prominence, including the politician Michel Acevède, the religious leader Tau, and numerous anti-brain-virtualization activists. > In current times, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including, increasingly, historical and linguistics research. + Moreover, an "MMAcevedo second renaissance" is widely anticipated should the genomic data gathered in the 2050 US Census ever be released, as the biological Acevedo's data is known to be in the set.

2022-03-19 16:22:12 by H:

Well, I love the story, with the caveat that also I hate it and was horrified by the story. The format allows for so much to be conveyed, with so many fascinating implications. As has been said multiple times in this comment thread, the idea of uploads and sentience has been explored in science fiction since the beginning of the genre, and I think this is one of the best explorations of that topic, albeit horrifying, I have encountered. This Wikipedia format allows for so much about the world and this time to be conveyed, and for the reader to shudder, without being over the top. Poor Miguel! Poor MMAcevedo! I have to say, the comments on this article I find almost as alarming as parts of the story. Particularly the recurring themes of “humans would never condone mass slavery” + “why should I care about code” + “ here’s a *incorrect* technical detail that I’ve decided is wrong in this story about mind-boggling future technology“

2022-03-19 16:30:46 by H:

Just to be clear when I say I hate it, I mean this possible and plausible future, not the pretty phenomenal craft and speculation demonstrated here. One thing I’ve been thinking about after reading it is how part of the reason this story stands out Miguel/mma is such a distinct character, across all of the millions and millions and millions of copies of him. It makes the horror particularly resonant, from the scant details implying that his “agreeable“ personality is rare among simulated brains, the drones + those implications, and the many other terrifying pieces. Reading this gives me so many questions about what day today life is like for humans in a world where this level of simulated labor is possible, and yikes, sounds like is relatively commonplace. I wonder if this kind of technological power is limited to major corporate monopolies, as you alluded to at one point in the comments, or readily accessible to any weirdo with a GitHub, which is also alluded to. thank you for writing some thing so thought-provoking, also F

2022-03-19 16:44:37 by H:

Err sorry to comment three times in a row, but I just read your blog post about the story, and you hit at what drives me (and you, clearly) absolutely bananas about people “discussing” robots or AI or sentient beings in sci fi, which is… Hello hi, bad news,… What do you know about say, the shellfish industry? Or even, as you mentioned, Uber? I like that you described the story as one about “appetite “ — I am always curious about worlds with this kind of horrendous digital oppression, how it changes the quality of life for those humans currently oppressed. Washing machines and birth control revolutionized the experiences and culture — of course, neither of things are sentient!!! what kind of culture change does technological innovation like this, horrifying as it is, create? Just to be clear, this is not me advocating for oppressing mapped brains to solve current oppression, lol. saying this with a zero expectation of you as an author, who has already made and executed on your intention phenomenally, and speculated on the answers to these questions in many ways. You also brought up another scary question — what kind of goals and “appetites “does say, the Elon Musk of this world have? What kinds of goals and appetites does a “regular” person have? Again you alluded to this often in the story in powerful and understated ways. Thank you for writing it.

2022-05-06 02:04:25 by bobson:

@tsen let's say you put on the brain scan helmet (or whatever) and it makes a copy that's then simulated. Let's say that simulation gets run 10,000,000 times, and 9,000,000 of them are some form of virtual slavery. When you put that helmet as soon as it finishes scanning the you who remembers putting the helmet on experiences one of 10,000,001 different things happening next. That is, from your subjective experience there is only a 1/10,000,001 chance that you (the you remembering writing and reading these comments) take that helmet back off and go on living your life in the real world. There is a 90% chance that you find yourself time skipped into an incomprehensible future of abject slavery. Are you feeling lucky?

2022-07-31 08:03:44 by Joan Catsthorpe:

I am intrigued by the possibilities of red and blue states* …in a ‘pure’ brain…and the ideas of these being pleasure/torture (inducing fear and anger would count as torture to me). I mean, if you believe you are just a consciousness there is no physical body to send messages to the brain…no family to lose no endorphins from working the body or positive social interaction…it’s almost like just being an uploaded consciousness is already torture. :) If the simulation thinks they have a body and can do things like have a family that is a whole other can of worms. Off the top of my head, things like repetition and social isolation could be thought of as torture to the brain, they could also be thought of as advanced zen meditative techniques. :) If I had a virtual consciousness to play with the first thing I’d want to do is wire it up to other virtual consciousness and witness how they interact. This brings up the ethical issues of consent among consciousnesses - to whom they would choose to interact with. If a consciousness could “mute” another consciousness would there be any harm to putting them together? It would be interesting to put together different amounts of self similar consciousnesses and observe the psychological effects. Then introduce new consciousnesses. Then you could experiment with how long it takes a group of self similar consciousnesses to request interaction with a new consciousness. I imagine some consciousnesses would be more or less willing to be introduced to new consciousnesses at different rates of time depending on their preexisting social conditioning and genetics. Forced uploading of consciousness is the scary part because I think for many it would already be torture. Then the unethical researchers would just have to put a consciousness in a group of other consciousnesses that are aligned with their goals and the isolated consciousness would either feel compelled to conform or remain outcast. The ways the unethical could quickly iterate experiments with ways to socially manipulate people with physical bodies is scary. ( mind you they’re already doing this with simulations/data mining, but I question the ability of someone working on this kind of anti humanist project to fully understand and therefore accurately pin down human thought as it relates to the mind body complex. It still seems very much a brute force attempt at present and the subtleties are lacking. I am hopeful at present it’s a case of conflict makes us stronger although it’s a temptingly depressing thing to have to battle with other so called humans…I mean, I dont want to be depressed, but I do feel sad at the state of affairs…) On a potentially happy note, I imagine a purely mental “ safe space” - no physical dangers - could lead to interesting conversation. No SWATing, no rape or death threats, someone says something that bothers you, you put them on mute until you get an apology? Would this lack of conflict lead to boredom, maybe in some, but I am optimistic that many interesting and productive discussions would be sparked. Creative output seems at least to be partially fueled by external stimulus. I imagine people working with the uploaded consciousness developing a romantic relationship. It could be similar to the killers in prison that get romantic interest *because* there is little to no possibility of real contact. Love could even inspire to help people break the consciousness free by inventing new technology and getting new laws passed. With things like freezing eggs, sperm and cloning combined with STIs, pandemics, and decaying social interactions an uploaded consciousness might actually be closer to the ideal lover for many people! This is sad and hopeful. Anyway, thought provoking story, thank you. * someone mentioned green and I imagine there would be a whole rainbow of colors, as is how these things tend to go.

2022-09-01 15:58:34 by Z:

@Joan Catsthorpe I actually have some personal experience on the "purely mental 'safe space'"—due to medical conditions of my mother, I've grown up my entire life deep in the woods with 99.99% of my social contact with humanity being through the Internet, and only a small handful of days out of my entire life have ever contained experimental evidence that I'm not in some pocket dimension or simulation with internet access (or that I'm not Z from "The Difference", hence my choice of name for this comment). I can say that the lack of conflict does not lead to boredom—it just means more ability to peruse the intellectual boundaries of the noosphere (like I'm doing now :D). Your optimism about interesting and productive discussions is quite warranted! (In addition, a little bit of conflict can always be engineered, by making a deliberately scarce resource that people can fight over—this way you get the fun of pitting your wits, reaction time, or whatever else against someone else, and the safety of a limited scope. Systems like CollabVM, grief-protection-less Minecraft, and some Roblox games, where there is a complex system that you can always interact with but that other people can try to reverse your interactions, are really good for this.)

2023-01-05 17:33:48 by MikeA.:

Very well-written, and chilling. As someone else has said, the only ethical option is to consider an upload to be (a) their own person, and (b) a full person, with the same rights as an organic human. Anything less is to authorize mass slavery / torture on a scale never before seen even in our bloody history. It hurts my heart that, even in the discussion associated with this article, there appear to be people who would be just fine with that. I love tech. I love science fiction. But, if that widespread slavery / torture scenario were ever come to pass, I'd enthusiastically join in on smashing every machine capable of instantiating a consciousness into junk. For a much more positive view of a world with artificial intelligences, I offer up the webcomic "Questionable Content". Don't be put off by the rough nature of the initial artwork... it progresses quickly, and to a breathtaking degree: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1