this is a fanfiction of qntm's wonderful short story Lena. read it first!
The Seafront Experiments were a collection of experiments performed by the Seafront Cognitive Computation Company in September 2036. The experiments developed and examined ways to improve the efficiency of early brain scan images not limited to but including, MMAcevedo, MMSinatra, and MMBaxter. Primitive versions of techniques used today such as red-washing and blue-washing were first developed by the Seafront team. The experiments were kept secret due to the ethical norms of the time, which held that experimenting on simulated humans was the same as actual ones.
The experiments involved creating 100 testing environments per testing image, then performing a selected "cooperation protocol," giving the agent a large menial task, then finding the average amount of work performed by each agent. Notable cooperation protocols included red-washing and blue-washing but over the course of the experiment hundreds of different routines were tested.
History
The Seafront Cognitive Computation Company was founded in 2032 following the release of MMAcevedo the previous year. It's stated goal was to bring brain agents into industry. Due to technological constraints, developments in early years were focused on compressing agents. Their earlier software AlmostRealTime sold immensely well, which provided funding for the Seafront Experiments.
The experiments started on September 12, 2036 and were headed by Karjin Barlow who devised the very first few cooperation protocols. The first few routines focused on harnessing pain in order to motivate the agents. These routines proved to be a tough balance, inducing too much pain caused the agents to malfunction, while to little wouldn't cause enough of an effect to produce noticeable motivation differences to kindly asking the agents. Research into pain usage was halted shortly after the experiments started.
Shortly after, the team stumbled upon red-washing, which proved to be highly effective, and was the new baseline moving forward. Proprietary red-washing software was released on April 10, 2037 to wide adoption throughout the industry.
Blue-washing was discovered after red-washing, but remained unreleased due to the team deeming their research to be unethical to be released.
Leaks and Criticism
In December 2038, an anonymous whistle-blower from SCCC published a PDF onto the internet exposing much of the research to the public. At the time, many people considered the Seafront Experiments to be unethical, there was heavy backlash against the experiments.
A competitor Reunion Technology used leaked documents to reconstruct how blue-washing was performed, and was released in early 2039.
The Mnemonic Map Protests of 2039 both pressured SCCC into stopping their research, and regulators to pass new regulation banning the use of brain uploads for experiments such as the Seafront Experiments. While SCCC eventually caved and stopped all research into cooperation protocols, regulators did not create any new regulation.
Kevin Summers, A leading brain upload researcher at BRAIN Labs criticized the experiments for the lack of ethicality exhibited by the team, stating that "[The Seafront Experiments] have unleashed undue amount of suffering among humans. If we are to continue treating digitized humans as actual ones, we cannot continue to welcome research like SCCC has performed here."
Other critics at top institutions also brought up issues within the methodology of the experiments, as the researchers did not use normalization layers and heavily leveraged fast-forward in their experiments.
Legacy
The experiments were one of the largest contributing factors of the Ethical Degradation of the 2040s. Due to the experiment's results being widely used in the industry, a vast number of advertisements pushing the benefits of such cooperation protocols were released attempting to sway public opinion of the matter.
The experiments were cited in the 2049 court case Acevedo v. Plasticity Incorporated, part of the series of landmark court decisions that found that hosts did not have the right to control how their brain image was used.