[noir_lord]

> At that point why not employ real humans in the first place?

Cost mostly, If you can replicate a human-level intelligence for 10,000 (or 100,000) and have it work 24/7 with no time off and scale out to thousands of them then you'd have something absolutely terrifying in it's capability.

Image an AWS of a 1000 von-neumann level intelligences working co-operatively 24/7 on a problem.

The stuff of sci-fi right now but maybe one day, we know it's physically possible to build human level intelligences since we prove that the rest is 'just' engineering.