How silly of me to not read the project website. Poking around, it looks like they aren't exactly limiting themselves in scope that much.
Thanks for the link to that thread; I had not seen it! I e-mailed Stuart Armstrong to try to figure out what the current position of the FHI is.
The FHI position on WBE is by no means uniform. The key questions are whether WBE research will lead to neuromorphic AI (NAI), whether WBE makes FAI more or less likey, and whether (WBE transition) followed by (AI transition) is more survivable than the other way round (and, of course, on the problems and solutions of WBE itself, eg Robin's nightmare scenario vs effective immortality).
My position is that successful WBE will make FAI tremendously easier (we can for instance tell the AI "do what this WBE program would tell you to do, if you ran it for a...
This is the team responsible for simulating the rat cortical column.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110308/full/news.2011.143.htm
The team is one of 6 that is being considered for at least 2 "FET Flagship" positions, which comes with all that funding. Each of the six competing teams is proposing to work on some kind of futuristic technology:http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/programme/fet/flagship/6pilots_en.html
Of course, word on the street is that academic neuroscientists don't think much of the project:
I think trying to influence the committee's decision potentially represents very low hanging fruit in politics as charity.
Even if academic neuroscientists don't think much of the project in its current state, it seems likely that $1.4 billion would end up attracting a lot of talent to this problem, and get us the first upload significantly sooner.
It's true that Less Wrong doesn't have a consensus position on whether to speed development of cell modeling and brain scanning technology or not. But I think if we have a discussion and a vote, we're significantly more likely than the committee to come up with the right decision for humanity. As far as I can tell, the committee will essentially be choosing at random. It shouldn't be hard for us to beat that.
Edit: But that's not to say that our estimate should be quick and dirty. In the spirit of holding off on proposing solutions, I discourage anyone from taking a firm public position on this topic for now.
In terms of avenues for influence, here are a few ideas off the top of my head:
We, and the folks at the Future of Humanity Institute, SI, and other groups, seem to spend a lot of time thinking about what would happen in the ideal scenario in terms of the order in which technologies are developed and how they are deployed. I think there is a good case for also investing in the complementary good of trying to actually influence the world towards a more ideal scenario.