There could be vastly more ems than biological brains, and new designs very unlike the original could be created much more easily with ems.
ETA: ems would also allow different economic structures, like starting a million copies working in parallel on rented hardware when a new problem needs to be solved, then killing them off an hour later and staying low-key for the rest of the day.
I had in mind the ethical concerns of the OP. Economically, of course, wetware and silicon are rather different.
But you are correct to point out an issue relevant to the OP’s question (can you make a superhuman AI out of biological brains) -- wetware scales rather poorly. At least the usual Earth’s carbon-based wetware based mostly on chemistry in liquid and semi-liquid mediums.
There could be vastly more ems than biological brains, and new designs very unlike the original could be created much more easily with ems.
ETA: ems would also allow different economic structures, like starting a million copies working in parallel on rented hardware when a new problem needs to be solved, then killing them off an hour later and staying low-key for the rest of the day.
I had in mind the ethical concerns of the OP. Economically, of course, wetware and silicon are rather different.
But you are correct to point out an issue relevant to the OP’s question (can you make a superhuman AI out of biological brains) -- wetware scales rather poorly. At least the usual Earth’s carbon-based wetware based mostly on chemistry in liquid and semi-liquid mediums.