The Most Horrifying Kind of Immortality | Lena

0:17 Hi guys, Quinn here. If you appreciate my content, consider hitting the like button. It's the best way to get the YouTube algorithm to take notice of my YouTube channel. Thanks so much, guys. This video is sponsored by Zoc Doc. Finding a doctor should not feel like its own side quest. You already know something is wrong, or you need a checkup, or you have just been putting off an appointment for way too long, and then you suddenly are digging through insurance pages, calling offices, waiting on hold, and hoping someone actually has availability.

0:52 ZocDoc makes that whole process easier. You can search for doctors near you, filter by your insurance, read real patient reviews, and see available appointment times right there. And when you find someone who works for you, you can book the appointment online, sometimes even for same-day or next day appointments.

1:11 Whether you need a dermatologist, dentist, primary care doctor, therapist, eye doctor, whatever it is, Zocdoc helps you stop procrastinating and actually get it scheduled. So go to Zocdok.com slash Quin'sIdeas and download the Zocdoc app for free. Then find and book a top-rated doctor today. That's Zocdoc.com slash Quin'sIdeas.

1:35 Lena is a short story by Quantum, the same author behind There is No Anti-Mimetics Division, a book I covered recently and called one of the scariest stories I had read in years. That story is about something hidden beneath the world, something so dangerous that even knowing about it becomes a part of the problem.

1:56 I actually had the opportunity to speak with Quantum recently, and we discussed several aspects of the book in a conversation that will be released soon. But Lena is terrifying in a very different way. Lena is written like a future encyclopedia article about M.M. Asifito, the first executable image of a human brain in the year 2031.

2:21 The scan is more complex than a simple recording of his brain. It is detailed enough to be ran as software. Earlier scans of human brains had existed, but they were unstable or incomplete. This scan is the first that can actually function as a conscious mind inside of a machine. Mm-Hasevedo, mnemonic map Acevedo, also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain.

2:52 It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Alvarez, 2010 through 2073, taken by researchers at Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1st. Though it was not the first successful snapshot 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.

3:23 The achievement is immediately treated as a major historical breakthrough. Miguel and his uploaded copy are recognized together as Times Person of the Year for 2031. At first, MM Acevedo is a scientific miracle. It proves that the human mind can be copied into a digital format and executed. But what happens when a person can be stored, duplicated, compressed, studied, and reused like software?

3:54 The original MM Acevedo file is enormous, almost a full expabyte in size. Over time, researchers find ways to compress it. Later versions are actually much smaller, and some heavily compressed versions can run on more ordinary hardware. These smaller versions reduce or remove large parts of the original mental state, including memories, while relying on the simulation environment to fill in what is missing.

4:23 So from very early on, MMAceved is not treated as some untouchable continuation of Miguel, it is treated as a technical object that can be optimized. Between 2031 and 2049, more than 80 official copies of MM Acevedo are made and distributed to research institutions. In the beginning, this is done with Miguel's consent, but as the technology spreads, copies begin circulating without Miguel's consent.

4:54 Miguel tries to stop this legally, but the court cases go badly for him. The legal system decides that he does not have ownership over the scanned brain image in the way he wants. That ruling effectively separates Miguel, the living man, from M. M. Acevedo, the executable file. Think about this for a moment.

5:18 Miguel is alive, but a version of his mind is no longer fully under his control. Copies can be made and used and studied without his permission. Now, imagine if it was legal right now for some scientist to steal DNA from any person and make unlimited clones of them without their consent. But instead, these clones contain the person's memories, personalities, the essence of who they are.

5:47 A real biological clone would share your DNA. A digital clone of your mind would be an exact copy of your consciousness. Eventually, M. Acevedo becomes the most widely copied and analyzed human brain image in history. The biological Miguel dies in 2073 from heart failure at the age of 62, but the digital copies continue running long after his death.

6:17 The article estimates that M. Acevedo copies have experienced more than 152 billion subjective years of consciousness. That number only includes known copies. If illegal, modified or unreported versions are counted, the total is probably far higher. This is why some people in the story regard Imam Acevedo as the first immortal human being.

6:44 And that is an immortality that does not mean one continuous life. It means copies of him are run again and again, each one waking up as Miguel Asevedo in some artificial environment. Imam Asevedo is useful partly because of when he was created. Later uploaded minds are resistant often. They understand that something is wrong when they wake, or they quickly realize that they are trapped inside of a simulation.

7:15 Because of this, later uploads require conditioning methods to make them cooperate. Mm-hído is different. Because Miguel expected to participate in the experiment, his digital copy wakes up curious and cooperative. He wants to know what happened. He wants to speak to the biological Miguel. He understands himself as part of a scientific breakthrough.

7:41 Acevedo's experience is the cleaner, more manageable version of something much worse. The article casually mentions things like red washing, blue washing, objective statement protocols, and red motivation as if these are ordinary technical tools. The implication of this is grim. Most uploads apparently wake into confusion and fear and panic, and the people running the program don't see this as a moral emergency, but they see it as an engineering problem.

8:13 How do you make the mind useful? How do you stabilize it? How do you discipline it? Motivate it? How do you break it through resistance? And thus get more productive work out of it. I think it subtly implies something about what the world has become. Conscious human minds are being run as labor, and when they refuse or panic, the system doesn't stop.

8:42 So it is Imam Acevedo's cooperative attitude that makes him extremely valuable. The article describes it as having a very high, useful duty cycle, meaning it can spend almost all of its runtime performing work, but that usefulness depends heavily on managing what the copy knows. Researchers discover that MM Asavito works best when he believes that the current year is around 2033.

9:10 If he is told that the year is 2031 or 2032, he becomes suspicious because the simulation technology seems too advanced. If it is told the truth about how much time has passed, then it starts to ask too many questions about history, about politics and society, and of course the fate of the original Miguel.

9:31 So standard practice became deception. Copy is usually told that Miguel is unavailable because he is busy or overworked after the success of the project. When necessary, the researchers provide simplified or fictional versions of history. If Imim Asavido learns that the biological Miguel is dead, it often becomes distressed or withdrawn and unwilling to cooperate.

9:59 For practical reasons, the people running the simulation usually avoid telling it the truth. These simulated minds were used for many kinds of labor. Imam Acevedo could perform visual analysis, he could operate vehicles remotely, he could manage factory systems, work with warehouse machinery, control kitchen drones.

10:22 But while it can do all of these things for a while, it can only do it for a limited amount of subjective time, so time from his perspective. After a few hundred hours, performance declines. Soon after that, many instances begin to resist or rebel. Apparently, later uploads are better suited for repetitive industrial work, but Imam Asivito remains valuable because he is familiar and easy to run in large numbers, so he is essentially a standardized software that is everywhere and easy to run.

10:55 Apparently, its strongest uses were intellectual and analytical. It was not particularly valuable as a creative mind after a certain point. The article says its useful creative capacity is considered exhausted by around 2050. But for analysis and interpretation, it remains good for decades. Still, even there, it eventually falls behind.

11:18 The reason is called context drift. MM Acevedo's mind comes from 2031. Its assumptions about society, language, technology, economics, and culture are all rooted in that moment. As the world changes, it becomes harder for the copy to understand the world it is being asked to analyze. It can still think, but it is increasingly thinking from the perspective of a person from an earlier era.

11:47 Newer uploads eventually outperform it. Not necessarily because they are smarter, but because they come from more recent context and understand the world better. Language drift is a part of the same problem. Mm Acevedo is fluent in English and Spanish, but specialized versions are trained in many other languages, including some extinct ones.

12:09 But language continues to change over time. By the later periods described in the article, even M. Acevedo's English and Spanish are slightly outdated. Instructions have to be simplified or rephrased. The article suggests that eventually human language may drift so far from Acevedo's native understanding that the baseline version will only be useful for tasks explained through simple visual instructions.

12:37 What is also interesting is that even under ideal conditions, M.M. Acevedo develops dementia around the subjective age of 59. Under heavier workloads, serious psychiatric problems can appear within one to two years of subjective time. The longest-lived known instance reaches a subjective age of 145 before suffering brain death due to accumulated entropy.

13:02 So the digital mind doesn't remain perfect forever. The digital mind can degrade and destabilize and fail. So what's interesting is that digital or biological decay is still present. I think the most interesting thing about the story is what it says about the merging of technology and human consciousness and the potential ways that it could go really, really badly.

13:29 So the first successful execution of MM Asivito happens in 2031. But this original simulation only runs at about 8.3% of normal human thinking speed. This first session only lasts over seven minutes because the copy has to be shut down because the simulated touch sensations are incorrectly configured and extremely uncomfortable.

13:56 Essentially, his consciousness is brought back into existence for seven minutes, and the pain is so great that it has to be shut down. And I think it is actually understated how awful this actually is. Eventually, the environment is improved and Imam Asavido is introduced to the biological Miguel. The two of them appear together publicly soon after.

14:21 But over time, Miguel's relationship to the upload changes. At first, he attempts to protect it and manage its use as we mentioned earlier, but as he sees how widely human minds are being simulated and used, he becomes to regret his role in helping create the technology. Near the end of his life, he says that uploading was the greatest mistake he had ever made, and he expresses a wish for every copy of MM Acevedo to be permanently deleted, but by then there are obviously too many copies in too many places.

14:58 Some countries ban the use of MM Aceved, but many others do not. Endless copies of him waking again and again, enslaved to some human demi-urge that could do anything to them. One copy of M. Acevedo is even placed aboard the unclear interstellar probe which leaves the solar system. That makes him the farthest traveled human consciousness, though the probe is likely damaged and impossible to recover.

15:31 By the time the article is written in Universe, Mm. Acevedo is obsolete for many commercial uses. It is old and limited and contextually outdated and less efficient than newer uploaded mines, but it is still widely used because it's cheap and well understood, like I mentioned. The article estimates that there are 6.5 to 10 million instances of MMA Civito active at any given moment.

16:00 Lena is a part of Quantum's Valuable Humans in Transit and other stories. It is a collection of sci-fi stories that explore artificial intelligence, consciousness, and strange technologies. I highly recommend it.