On Mar 16, 2008, at 9:35 AM, Eric B. Ramsay wrote:
Two guys in a garage would never have built the bomb.
Of course not, nuclear weapons require expensive and exotic manufacturing and development environments. AGI requires commodity silicon (like the kind in your cell phone) and a relatively trivial software development effort. There is no specific reason I can think of that two guys in a garage in the industrialized world could not build AGI.
I would make the observation that the vast majority of development effort for large engine-like software products is spent on ancillary bits like standards compliance, legacy integration, backward compatibility, pretty user interfaces, enterprise management/ administration, and the combinatorial explosion of all those ancillary bits interacting. An AGI system can skip almost all of this, since it is not as though the first version is going to sold in a shrinkwrap box in the "AI" section of your local software store with a sticker that says "New and Improved - Now with More Awesome!".
Take a look at the internals of a high-end transactional database engine sometime, which are among the more complex tightly-designed software engines humans build. The engines themselves, which subsume most functions of an operating system as well, are *well* within a million lines of code (usually more like 100k). The additional millions of lines are all commercial productization of some sort that is separate from the actual core capabilities.
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