I see what you mean when you say Moravec's estimate for the processing speed of the brain is low, but I still think your rough estimate is also probably high by a few orders of magnitude, simply because, (from what I've learned in biopsych): -rarely (or at least, substantially less than 100% of the time - not sure on any exact stats) do neurons fire constantly at their maximum speed. -the brain isn't using all it's circuits at once - at any given time a lot of the neurons are not firing or are firing only occasionally (I'm not sure on what the numbers are on this, I've heard 10% active volume/total volume = average, just as the word on the street sort of thing) However, again raising the estimate is the fact that one instruction doesn't necessarily equal one nerve impulse. In fact, it would take many instructions to simulate a single nerve impulse in a standard computer, wouldn't it? Since w/ MIPS they're measuring each single cycle through the arithmetic unit thing of the processor or something, and that should roughly correspond to half a synaptic interaction, since you have to multiply by the weight and then add that to the sum of the current total. So... depending on how many synapses per neuron, this is pretty bad news for the estimate I suppose. Still, who knows what technological advances the computer engineers will come up with? Also, I agree that the program will have to be designed to evolve/emerge. I think the idea of that is a little scary, personally. How much control can you have over it if you don't know exactly how it's doing what it does? So the day they create a hyper-intelligent 80 terrahertz machine entity, I'm not gonna lie, I'll be a little concerned for the welfare of the human race. I mean, even if you do an Asimov style thing and give it some absolute rules, consider the fact that a network occasionally makes mistakes. Imagine a robot with an interest in politics (since machine rights are a political issue, or something) whose computer brain fails to generalize the "Do not kill humans" rule to "Do not assassinate the president" or something crazy like that. And then this robot would say "I'm so sorry, I didn't realize he was a human, I thought 'president' was something different, I just want to be treated as an equal." Or something.