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?
It is very likely that it would, IMHO.
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 development, and a few more relating to pelvis morphology. There is no good reason for thinking that resizing brains is terribly difficult for nature to do - at least up to a point.
Could you define how we make a brain "bigger"? Do we replace every one neuron with 2, then connect them up the same way? Without a specific definition there's nothing but handwaving here, and it's my contention that finding the specific definition is the difficult part.
But more shockingly: do you really have evidence that the last six million years of human evolution was "turning a few knobs"? If so, then I would very much like to hear it. If not, then we seem to be operating under such divergent epistemologies that I'm not sure what else I can productively say here.