[ThomasBombadil]

So, if the distributed hardware infrastructure cluster supporting 10,000 EC2 mini compute instances is packed with 1,000,000 emulations of humans, how important are the physical data centers that encompass all their backups, master copies and live instances?

[loup-vaillant]

As important as a city hosting 1,000,000 people. No more, no less.

The emulation of a human is a human.

[ThomasBombadil]

I disagree. Less important, and no more important than a public library filled with books. It'd be a shame if it burned down, but the books are not the humans that wrote them. Those are long gone.