Personally I don’t have a strong opinion on which will come first, both seem entirely plausible to me.
We have a much better idea how difficult WBE is than how difficult engineering a human level machine intelligence is. We don’t even know for sure whether the latter is even possible for us (other than by pure trial and error).
There is a reasonably obvious path form where we are to WBE, while we aren’t even sure how to go about learning how to engineer an intelligence, it’s entirely possible that “start with studying WBEs in detail” is the best possible way.
There are currently a lot more people studying things that are required for WBE than there are people studying AGI, it’s difficult to tell which other fields of study would benefit AGI more strongly than WBE.
Personally I don’t have a strong opinion on which will come first, both seem entirely plausible to me.
We have a much better idea how difficult WBE is than how difficult engineering a human level machine intelligence is. We don’t even know for sure whether the latter is even possible for us (other than by pure trial and error).
There is a reasonably obvious path form where we are to WBE, while we aren’t even sure how to go about learning how to engineer an intelligence, it’s entirely possible that “start with studying WBEs in detail” is the best possible way.
There are currently a lot more people studying things that are required for WBE than there are people studying AGI, it’s difficult to tell which other fields of study would benefit AGI more strongly than WBE.