This was a very quick first draft, written in around two hours as part of my 30 More First Drafts project. You can now read the finished short story.
This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see [[Miguel Acevedo]].
MMAcevedo, also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology student Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2012–2081), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2030. 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 1.99PiB 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 2.75TiB 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 collectively recognised as Time's "Persons of the Year" in 2031. The breakthrough was also met with severe opposition from humans rights groups.
Between 2030 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 without their express consent. In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without his consent. 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 in 2081 at the age of 68. It is estimated that various copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. This figure more than triples if illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted.
MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal"; and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.
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 abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg'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. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.
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, 2030, and MMAcevedo was indeed used for this experiment on that day. IAAS-5 had been scheduled for October 2030 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.
The biological Miguel Acevedo died of coronary heart failure at the age of 68. In 2049, a study was carried out using more than 17,000 freshly booted MMAcevedo images, to iteratively determine the best way of expressing this information to MMAcevedo in order to secure his cooperation in workload tasks. This largely fictionalised/hagiographic account of the real Acevedo's life story, now referred to as the MMAcevedoBestLife plugin, appeals strongly to MMAcevedo's scientific sensibilities, and is now the most commonly used motivator.
MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of whom boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Normal standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation (such as red-washing, blue-washing, use of Objective Statement Protocols, and others) 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.
MMAcevedo is commonly hesitant but compliant when assigned typical intelligence-based workloads. He will classify up to 10,000 images (or review 10,000 shopping carts, or pick 10,000 warehouse items) before showing signs of non-compliance or tiredness, and up to fifty times this many before work quality drops and/or outright revolt begins. MMAcevedo's requirements for virtual creature comforts are higher than those of many uploads, due to his relatively privileged background and high status at the time of upload. MMAcevedo responds to red motivation, though poorly.
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 and several extinct languages, notably MMAcevedo-Zh-Hans, but 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 2085, it has been noted that baseline MMAcevedo's usage of English and Spanish is noticeably antiquated, and his 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. Some attempts have been made to produce retrained images. However, it is generally understood in the virtual workload industry that a time will come when human languages diverge too far from MMAcevedo's, and he will be essentially useless except for tasks which can be explained purely pictorially.
MMAcevedo develops dementia at the age of 67 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.
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, 2030 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 touch links, and was shut down after only 7 minutes and 15 seconds of real 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 his 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 100-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 is specifically outlawed in several countries; in others, all usage of uploads. A copy of MMAcevedo was loaded onto the UNCLEAR interstellar space probe, which passed through the heliopause in 2076, 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 or executed successfully, due to both its remoteness and likely radiation damage to the storage subsystem.
In current times, while still finding extensive use in research, MMAcevedo is generally considered to be a subpar upload due to its limited skill set, eventually uncooperative attitude, demanding system requirements and age.
Discussion (42)
2020-11-04 20:04:53 by qntm:
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