[jfoutz]

I'd wager human brains to a lot of stuff unrelated to solving problems at hand, like keeping the heart beating. Given that the machines don't need to do all of the underlying biological stuff, you can probably get away with fewer connections.

[jpadkins]

might be the same amount of overhead needed for an OS to keep tabs on it's hardware, cluster, etc. Just like brains need to translate to the physical world via the nervous system, pure software needs to translate to the physical world via an OS.