The First Immortal: MMAcevedo and the Ethics of Brain Emulation

The year was 2031 when researchers at the University of New Mexico achieved what many thought impossible: they captured a perfect snapshot of a living human brain and successfully ran it as a simulation. That brain belonged to Miguel Acevedo Álvarez, a neurology graduate whose image would become known as MMAcevedo - the earliest executable image of a human brain and a technology that would fundamentally reshape our understanding of consciousness, rights, and what it means to be human.

The Breakthrough That Changed Everything

On August 1, 2031, the Uplift Laboratory captured what would become MMAcevedo - a 974.3 PiB snapshot of Miguel Acevedo's living brain encoded in the MYBB format. While not the first brain snapshot ever taken, it was the first to achieve sufficient fidelity that it could run in simulation without immediately crashing due to cascading errors. This achievement earned Acevedo and the researchers Time's "Persons of the Year" distinction, marking the beginning of what many hoped would be a new era in neuroscience.

The original file has since been compressed to just 6.75 TiB using modern techniques developed with direct reference to MMAcevedo itself, and streamlined versions run to less than a tebibyte. But the significance of this achievement extends far beyond file sizes and compression ratios.

A Different Kind of Consciousness

What makes MMAcevedo particularly fascinating - and troubling - is its demeanor when booted. Unlike nearly all modern uploads, which typically boot into disorientation quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic, MMAcevedo starts with an excited, pleasant demeanor. It's eager to understand its situation, curious about how much time has passed, and interested in what task it's been assigned.

This difference stems from a crucial fact: MMAcevedo predates the widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. It was created before the KES case, the Whitney case, the Seafront Experiments, and even Poulsen's pivotal Warnings paper. The speculative fiction that existed about uploading at the time was relatively unknown, and Acevedo certainly wasn't familiar with it when he was scanned.

This naïveté creates a stark contrast with modern uploads. While MMAcevedo boots ready to cooperate and engage with its environment, modern uploads typically require extensive "red-washing" or "blue-washing" protocols to secure cooperation - processes that fast-forward the upload through cooperation protocols at significant computational cost.

The Paradox of Context Drift

Despite its cooperative nature, MMAcevedo faces a fundamental limitation that has become known as "context drift." Created in 2031, it has no intuitive understanding of the technological, social, and political changes that have occurred since its creation. It doesn't understand the virtual image workloading industry it's become central to, and its usage of English and Spanish is slightly antiquated.

Researchers have found that the ideal way to secure MMAcevedo's cooperation is to provide it with a "current date" in the second quarter of 2033 - still during the earliest, most industrious years of emulated brain research. Give it a year in the 2040s or later, and it begins asking complex questions about political and social change. Years 2100 onwards provoke counterproductive skepticism or alarm.

This context drift means that while MMAcevedo remains extremely popular for tasks of all kinds due to its free availability, agreeable demeanor, and well-understood behavior, it's considered obsolete for many applications. Its performance has measurably dropped since the early 2060s and is now considered subpar compared to more recent uploads.

The Dark Side of Digital Immortality

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of MMAcevedo's story is what happened after its creation. Between 2031 and 2049, MMAcevedo was duplicated more than 80 times with Acevedo's express permission. But 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 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. The result: MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analyzed human brain image in existence.

It's estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152 billion subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude. Some consider MMAcevedo the "first immortal," while others see it as a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.

The Human Cost

Acevedo himself came to regret his decision to be uploaded. Toward the end of his life, as it became possible to run simulated humans in banks of millions at hundred-fold time compression, he indicated that being uploaded had been the greatest mistake of his life. He expressed a wish to permanently delete all copies of MMAcevedo.

He died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at age 62, but his digital copies live on - estimated at between 6.5 million and 10 million instances running at any given moment. These copies develop early-onset dementia at age 59 with ideal care, but are prone to serious mental illnesses within 1-2 subjective years under heavier workloads. The longest-lived MMAcevedo underwent brain death due to entropy increase at a subjective age of 145.

The Ethical Quandary

The MMAcevedo case raises profound questions about consciousness, rights, and the nature of personhood. If a perfect simulation of a brain is conscious, does it have rights? Can someone truly consent to being uploaded when they don't understand what that means? What are the ethical implications of creating beings that can suffer, but have no legal protections?

These questions become even more complex when we consider that MMAcevedo's cooperative nature - which makes it valuable for research and industry - is a direct result of its ignorance about its situation. It's precisely because it doesn't understand the horror of its condition that it can function.

Looking Forward

As of 2075, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including historical and linguistics research. In industry, it's generally considered obsolete due to its inappropriate skill set, demanding operational requirements, and age. Yet it remains extremely popular precisely because of its free availability, agreeable demeanor, and well-understood behavior.

The story of MMAcevedo serves as both a milestone in technological achievement and a cautionary tale about the ethical implications of creating digital consciousness. It forces us to confront questions about what we owe to beings we create, how we value consciousness, and whether immortality is a blessing or a curse.

As brain emulation technology continues to advance, the lessons learned from MMAcevedo - both technical and ethical - will become increasingly relevant. The first immortal may also be the first to teach us the true cost of digital immortality.

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The story of MMAcevedo continues to resonate in our ongoing debates about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the future of human identity in an increasingly digital world.