This is a decent overview, but I feel like I should bring up one thing it didn't mention: safety. We're a significant distance away from being able to emulate a

This is a decent overview, but I feel like I should bring up one thing it didn't mention: safety. We're a significant distance away from being able to emulate a whole brain, and... that's a good thing. Imagine your brain were scanned, and you found yourself running as a computer program. Consider the powers that would give you. You could make copies of yourself, obviously. You could tune some parameters, to try to increase your intelligence. You could A/B test your copies with identical memories in identical situations, to see what effect that tuning has, and you could incorporate enhancements that wouldn't work biologically. So there's a pretty high chance that you'd end up with a superhuman level intelligence, or at least John von Neumann level intelligence. Plus a large number of copies. At the same time, the emulation might be imperfect, the modifications and enhancements might have unanticipated side effects, there's a whole lot of opportunities for sanity damage. That's on top of the base rate of humans being evil or turning evil when given power, which is itself uncomfortably high. And finally, there's one more wrinkle. Suppose brain-scanning and whole-brain emulation technology are in the wild, and a bunch of different people scan their brains and start running on computers. In this world, if you hack into someone's hardware and halt their brain program, you can repurpose it to run copies of yourself. While computer security is probably better in that future world than it is today, I seriously doubt that it will be better by nearly enough. If you're thinking of getting into brain-emulation research, please consider also putting some work into safety research. And in the unlikely event your work should pass the level of treating mundane ailments, and moves into the territory of breakthroughs, please remember that you are playing with fire.