Compared to the human brains currently driving the economy, artificial general intelligence and whole brain emulation have some fundamentally new properties. Once they become generally intelligent enough to perform a wide range of economic functions, they are likely to bring radical changes.
An important aspect of the question is that of economic growth. The invention of AGI or WBE could cause a sudden increase in growth by adding machine intelligence to the pool of human innovators. Machine intelligence could be much cheaper to produce, faster, and qualitatively smarter than human talent. A feedback loop from better machine intelligence technology, to more and better machine researchers, back to better machine intelligence technology could ensue.
Robin Hanson has written much about the economics of whole brain emulation. In his view, the unrestricted creation of additional uploads will cause a Malthusian scenario, where upload wages fall to subsistence levels. He sees the transition to whole brain emulation as a jump to a new "growth mode" with higher exponential growth rates, similar to the transitions to agriculture and industry....