Your links are of depressingly low quality. I've seen the whole brain emulation roadmap report from 2008 floating around here on LW more than once, and it is a far more robust document than what you've presented. I suggest you familiarize yourself with it. (It's worth noting that none of its assumptions have been falsified unlike your Lotus link; and it is also an actual scientifically conducted report, as opposed to either your SEED Magazine or your Lotus page.)
That being said:
WBE takes bioinspiration to an extreme level. Engineers just don't use bioinspiration that much.
No, it doesn't. It takes modeling to an extreme level. WBE is more likely to me for a simple reason: we can implement a brain without understanding how it works. To achieve human-equivalent AGI requires that we know what we are doing. And despite six decades' worth of research on that topic, I cannot as of yet see any discernable indications that we are significantly closer to mastering general intelligence than we were when we began the effort. Certainly, we have no theoretical mechanic for describing how consciousness or non-conscious general intelligence operate.
We'd need that before we could begin to go any further. Now, yes -- having a working emulated brain would allow us to use our current methods of study to attempt to discern what is or is not necessary for cognition and/or problem solving, through brute-force reverse-engineering. And it is possible that the process to figuring out how to emulate a brain will enable us to do that before-hand. I am more than willing to adjust my assesments of probability on this in the light of updated information.
But according to the information as yet available -- AGI is distantly remote. WBE is not.
Unspecified false assumptions seems to be too weak to respond to. That page refers to a bunch of estimates and surveys relating to the estimated time to superintelligence by a range of individuals and groups.
WBE is more likely to me for a simple reason: we can implement a brain without understanding how it works. To achieve human-equivalent AGI requires that we know what we are doing.
If we can build a model of a worm brain, we can probably scale it up a billion times without any deep understanding of how it works. That's just one type of shortcut to ...
If you were a utilitarian, then why would you want to risk creating an AGI that had the potential to be an existential risk, when you could eliminate all suffering with the advent of WBE (whole brain emulation) and hence virtual reality (or digital alteration of your source code) and hence utopia? Wouldn't you want to try to prevent AI research and just promote WBE research? Or is it that AGI is more likely to come before WBE and so we should focus our efforts on making sure that the AGI is friendly? Or maybe uploading isn't possible for technological or philosophical reasons (substrate dependence)?
Is there a link to a discussion on this that I'm missing out on?