> you need hardware at least 20x faster than the hardware needed to run the Super Nintendo natively Only if the emulating hardware is general purpose. Yes, si

> you need hardware at least 20x faster than the hardware needed to run the Super Nintendo natively Only if the emulating hardware is general purpose. Yes, simulating a human brain on a cluster of Intel i7's or AMD GPU's, or their future equivalents, will probably require an enormous hardware investment. But once you have one working emulated brain on general-purpose hardware, you can produce specialized hardware. E.g. if we knew that Super Nintendo held the secrets to immortality, we would soon make updated versions of all its chips with today's technology, and you could probably fit dozens or hundreds of SNES cores on a single modern chip with the decades of improvement in manufacturing processes. Likewise, once we make an initial discovery of how to emulate human brains on general-purpose computers, the things we find out from that implementation will start to pave the way for special-purpose computers that can more cost-effectively execute the brain emulation application. Also, it's entirely possible that you can emulate human brains, but you don't know how to create more potential. E.g., if we can simulate the physics and chemistry of human brains well enough to replicate cognitive processes, but our best experts are simply stumped at figuring out exactly which essential features of the physical/chemical processes translate into intelligence. And if early experiments at tweaking model parameters show that the human brain has evolved into some local maximum, where any tweak produces a less powerful intelligence or one that's defective in some way, and after this is observed over many experiments, it might then become taboo to tweak the model for ethical reasons, making the situation stable over the long term. In other words, we might be "forced" to "waste" cycles if we can't figure out which cycles we're wasting, and the experiments that might tell us would entail sacrificing too many artificial humans to be ethically acceptable. This state of affairs isn't necessarily likely, but it's certainly possible.