How good an emulation is required?

Reading this article on requiring lots of processing power to emulate the snes accurately, made me think that we will likely have similar issues when emulating humans.

I'd imagine weird timing and chemical interactions being used by the brain as it is an adaptable system and might be able adapt to use them if they turn out to be helpful.

This suggested to me a few issues with no easy answers that I could see.

Is it better to emulate 1 human faithfully or 10 humans with occasional glitches (for example could no longer appreciate music in the same way)
How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you gave up your body.
How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before letting it use heavy machinery.
How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you had it working on FAI.

Also please ignore the 3Ghz vs 25Mhz comparison, it perpetuates the myth that computational power is about clock speed and not operations per second and memory bandwidth.

Reading this article on requiring lots of processing power to emulate the snes accurately, made me think that we will likely have similar issues when emulating humans.

I'd imagine weird timing and chemical interactions being used by the brain as it is an adaptable system and might be able adapt to use them if they turn out to be helpful.

This suggested to me a few issues with no easy answers that I could see.

Is it better to emulate 1 human faithfully or 10 humans with occasional glitches (for example could no longer appreciate music in the same way)
How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you gave up your body.
How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before letting it use heavy machinery.
How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you had it working on FAI.

Also please ignore the 3Ghz vs 25Mhz comparison, it perpetuates the myth that computational power is about clock speed and not operations per second and memory bandwidth.

It seems plausible that similar issues could occur when emulating a human brain. But if they do, wouldn't it be probable that they could be resolved with a simple increase in processing power? (Or possibly by buffering of sensory input.)

If you read the article, you'll see the answer is simply "no". The whole point of the article is that throwing more resources at the problem doesn't, by itself, increase ease of emulation.

I spent three years working on a product whose only function was to take binaries compiled for a GNU/Linux distro on one CPU, and make them runnable on the same distro but another CPU. Having seen how difficult this is to do even when you're talking about the same OS, to which you have the source code, and two human-designed Von Neuman architecture chips, I know that 'uploading' will take far, far, far more effort than most people on this site currently believe.

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How good an emulation is required?

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How good an emulation is required?

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