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CarlShulman comments on Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It - Less Wrong
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This is an important generalization, but there are also many counterexamples in our use of biotech in agriculture, medicine, chemical production, etc. We can't design a custom cell, but Craig Venter can create a new 'minimal' genome from raw feedstuffs by copying from nature, and then add further enhancements to it. We produce alcohol using living organisms rather than a more efficient chemical process, and so forth. It looks like humans will be able to radically enhance human intelligence genetically through statistical study of human variation rather than mechanistic understanding of different pathways.
Creating an emulation involves a lot of further work, but one might put it in a reference class with members like the extensive work needed to get DNA synthesis, sequencing, and other biotechnologies to the point of producing Craig Venter's 'minimal genome' cells.
Sure - but again, it looks as though that will mostly be relatively insignificant and happen too late. We should still do it. It won't prevent a transition to engineered machine intelligence, though it might smooth the transition a little.
As I argue in my Against Whole Brain Emulation essay the idea is more wishful thinking and marketing than anything else.
Whole brain emulation as a P.R. exercise is a pretty stomach-churing idea from my perspective - but that does seem to be what is happening.
Possibly biotechnology will result in nanotechnological computing substrates. However, that seems to be a bit different from "whole brain emulation".
People like Kurzweil (who doesn't think that WBE will come first) may talk about it in the context of "we will merge with the machines, they won't be an alien outgroup" as a P.R. exercise to make AI less scary. Some people also talk about whole brain emulation as an easy-to-explain loose upper bound on AI difficulty. But people like Robin Hanson who argue that WBE will come first do not give any indications of being engaged in PR, aside from their disagreement with you on the difficulty of theoretical advances in AI and so forth.