I don't see any fundamental reason a human brain couldn't be simulated at the atomic level by a turing machine, so it follows intelligence should be able to come from a machine, as far as it can come from a human.

Simulating that brain will require you to provide some sort of inputs and do something with the outputs. Which gets you into questions of "what does this simulated brain want" once again. How much of human desire and behavior comes from the body? I want to avoid pain (signals that my body sends to my brain). I want to experience pleasure (also signals that my body sends to my brain).

If you simulate a body with the same inputs as the existing brain, do you just have a "faster horse" problem, where you have a brain that could possibly perceive/process information faster (or slower) than a real human depending on the speed of the simulation? That could be useful, but sounds potentially rather bleak, especially if we limit what it can do to change its environment. It also seems limited for e.g. central planning - it can do planning faster than any individual, but likely will still have working memory size limitations, if it's just a simulation of a human brain. So it may not be so much better than parallelizing tasks across a bunch of humans.

More interesting, probably, then, than the "super human" style, is giving a new sort of intelligence different and additional senses, so that it doesn't want or need the same sort of physical embodiment we have, a la the "set sets" in the Terra Ignota series. But then we have to figure out what separates abstract intelligence from our own senses, and how to usefully augment it with new senses for a data-based world...

Yes, I often have to consider the context of the excel spreadsheets on my VMs, because you can’t know how to run a machine without knowing what it wants at a high level.

Given this is HN, I honestly can't tell if you are being genuine or snarky.