Huh? I didn't mean opportunity cost, but simply that successful neuromorphic AI destroys the world. Staging a global catastrophe does have lower expected value than protecting from global catastrophe (with whatever probabilities), but also lower expected value than watching TV.

I was saying that it could be that with more information we would find that

0 < EU(Friendly AI research) < EU(Pushing for relatively safe neuromorphic AI) < EU(Successful construction of a Friendly AI).

even if there's a high chance that relatively safe neuromorphic AI would cause global catastrophe and carry no positive benefits. This could be the case if Friendly AI research sufficiently hard. I think that given the current uncertainty about the difficulty of friendly AI research would have to be extremely confident that relatively safe neuromorphic AI that would cause global catastrophe to rule this possibility out.

Indirectly, but with influence that compresses expected time-to-catastrophe after the tech starts working from decades-centuries to years (decades if WBE tech comes early and only slow or few uploads can be supported initially). It's not all lost at that point, since WBEs could do some FAI research, and would be in a better position to actually implement a FAI and think longer about it, but ease of producing an UFAI would go way up (directly, by physically faster research of AGI, or by experimenting with variations on human brains or optimization processes built out of WBEs).

Agree with this

The main thing that distinguishes WBEs is that they are still initially human, still have same values. All other tech breaks values, and giving it power makes humane values lose the world.

I think that I'd rather have an uploaded crow brain have its computational power and memory substantially increased and then go FOOM than have an arbitrary powerful optimization process; just because a neuromorphic AI wouldn't have values that are precisely human doesn't mean it wouldn't be totally devoid of value from our point of view.