That said, there are individuals that corporations pay more than a million dollars to rent the time of. If we assume that decision is cost-effective (which is a big “if”), getting to own those individuals outright for a million dollars might be a bargain.
Here, we risk crossing over from the realm of wondering “how much computer power it would take” into the bizarre fantasy realm—where emulations actually happen before engineered machine intelligence does.
Agreed. OTOH, to my mind we’d already made that crossover earlier in the discussion, as well… once we have engineered human-level machine intelligences in the mix, all assumptions about how much anything costs are just pretty-sounding numbers, so to talk about emulations costing a million dollars (or any other particular number) already presumes that we don’t have engineered human-level machine intelligences yet.
Typical humans, no.
That said, there are individuals that corporations pay more than a million dollars to rent the time of. If we assume that decision is cost-effective (which is a big “if”), getting to own those individuals outright for a million dollars might be a bargain.
Here, we risk crossing over from the realm of wondering “how much computer power it would take” into the bizarre fantasy realm—where emulations actually happen before engineered machine intelligence does.
Agreed. OTOH, to my mind we’d already made that crossover earlier in the discussion, as well… once we have engineered human-level machine intelligences in the mix, all assumptions about how much anything costs are just pretty-sounding numbers, so to talk about emulations costing a million dollars (or any other particular number) already presumes that we don’t have engineered human-level machine intelligences yet.