Once we can build a brain, we will certainly be able to make another one that is bigger, but that won't make it better. "Given this arrangement of neurons, what firing patterns will develop" is almost a completely different task than "given this problem to solve, what arrangement of neurons will best solve it", which itself is merely a footnote to the task of "wait, what are our definitions of 'problem' and 'best' again?"
Nature scaled chimpanzee brains up by creating billions of them and running them through millions of years of challenging environments; that's many orders of magnitude more difficult than building a single brain, and the result is merely expected to be whatever works best in the testing environments, which may or may not resemble what the creators of those environments want or expect.
Once we can build a brain, we will certainly be able to make another one that is bigger, but that won't make it better.
It is very likely that it would, IMHO.
Nature scaled chimpanzee brains up by creating billions of them and running them through millions of years of challenging environments; that's many orders of magnitude more difficult than building a single brain [...]
Nature had already done the R+D for buillding a partly-resizable brain, though. Turning a chimp brain into a human brain was mostly a case of turning a few knobs relating to brain ...
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?