While I agree with you about the economics, I’m trying to point out that physical reality also has constraints other than economic, many of them unknown, some of them discovered in the process of development.

Bird’s flight isn’t magic, or unknowable, or non reproduceable.

No. But it is unreproducible if you already have arms with shoulders, elbows, hands, and five stubby fingers. Human and bird bodies are sufficiently different that there are no close approximations for humans which will reproduce flight for humans as it is found in birds.

If it was, we’d have no sense of awe at learning about it, studying it. Imagine if human like behavior of intelligence was completely unknowable. How would we go about teaching things? Communicating at all? Sharing our experiences?

To me, this is a series of non-sequiturs. It’s obvious that you can have awe for something without having a genuine understanding of it, but that’s beside the point. Similarly, the kind of knowledge required for humans to communicate with one another isn’t relevant - what we want to know is the kind of knowledge which goes into the physical task of making artificial humans. And you ride roughshod of one of the most interesting aspects of the human experience: human communication and mutual understanding is possible across vast gulfs of the unknown, which is itself rather beautiful.

But again I can’t work out what makes that particularly relevant. I think there’s a clue here though:

…but I also take care not to put humanity, or intelligence in a broad sense, in some special magical untouchable place, either.

Right, but this would be a common (and mistaken) move some people make which I’m not making, and which I have no desire to make. You’re replying here to people who affirm either an implicit or explicit dualism about human consciousness, and say that the answers to some questions are just out of reach forever. I’m not one of those people, and I’m referring specifically to the words I used to make the point that I made, namely that there exist real physical constraints repeatedly approached and arrived at in the history of technology which demonstrate that not every problem has an ideal solution (and I refer you back to my earlier point about aircraft to show how that cashes out in practice).