Yes, the genome project was finished right on time when it seemed that it would take a few extra decades. But it had a very different idea than the simulation we’re talking about here. It’s one thing to take a complex set of chemical systems and decode them. Growing a full blown copy of a monstrously tangled and highly dynamic organ to build a faithful and flexible emulation is far more time consuming.

Now you could say that we could speed up that development time by just running all of the algorithms at a faster pace. However, if we’re going to try and get an accurate copy of the human mind with the kind of sapience we would recognize, we’d need to leave it alone to be exposed to stimuli and grow at a normal rate so we can check if the setup works. Once that’s done, we could talk about moving faster.

I could be confused here but if you’re assuming something will need that long to process with a computer, bear in mind that systems improve as something of an exponential rate – kurzweil often cites the example of the human genome project, where at the start objectors said it would take forever, and as time went on the discoveries came faster. A larger percent, something between I think 60-90% of the project was completed in the last year, thanks to the computers involved improving greatly

Morality is such a nebulous idea and when you try to make an equivalent of a human brain, you would be facing the same problems as we would trying to raise a child. And I’m sure that as a parent, you’ll know that just trying to raise someone with the same values you have doesn’t mean that you’ll be successful.

And Anissimov would tell you that’s why he advocates ‘constructing’ moral AI and slow uplift of said creation.

Now I don’t know if such a ‘being’ is possible, but I do know that through the power of intent certain agencies are trying to bring about AI, moral or otherwise.

Could this unleash power that would be disasterous for human beings?

Unfortunately, that’s an unknown.