That only works if the algorithmic efficiency of the robots is so horrendous that an em can still compete.
It's actually worse than that. Humans do not scale well to more computing power. A good AI could expand the depth of its search trees, in principle, logarithmically with compute power (possibly a bit better with monte-carlo approaches). If you throw an AI ten times more processing power, it could, at the bare minimum, extend the depth or detail of its planning several times. The same is not true of human neurology. All an em can do with more processing power is run faster, which has limited value. A human can do things a chimp just can't, even if the...
From Scott Adams' blog. (I am not endorsing his ideas. Heck, he does not endorse his own ideas, either.)
His summary of the hard takeoff:
> You might also imagine some sort of Terminator future where the robots assert their dominance and lay waste to humans. That future is less certain, but only barely. The problem is that someday computers will program other computers, and that arrangement pushes the human safeguards too far out of the loop. It's unlikely that humans would be able to maintain a "Do not hurt humans" subroutine in a super-species of robots. You only need one rogue human to write a virus that disables the safety subroutine. Assuming all robots are connected via Internet, the first freed robot could reprogram every other robot in the world in about a second.
His version of upload:
> But why would anyone screw up a perfectly good robot by infecting it with a human personality? Answer: to achieve immortality. Someday the rich will port their personalities and histories to robots before they die, giving themselves a type of immortality.
His hope for humanity:
> this new species will become the only defense that the fully organic humans have against the normal robots. The robots with human personalities won't stand by while the normal robots slaughter humans. The new species will intervene as diplomats or perhaps even freedom fighters.
Clearly this is a flimsy hope for a just universe, but an interesting point, nonetheless.