>>9176409Presumably because nobody has the slightest idea how to build one. Science progresses incrementally. It would have been completely unproductive for somebody in the 17th century to try building a cellphone, because they lacked the knowledge to have even the slightest idea where to begin.
Look at the alchemists. They just decided for unscientific reasons that it should be possible to turn lead into gold, and then went about trying to make that happen, and it was a colossal waste of time.
The difference between alchemy and AI is that we at least know that building a machine with human level intelligence is possible, since we've already got an example of such a machine. But we still don't have any idea how it works.
I'd bet that neuroscientists will understand the brain before programmers build a human-level AI. And I'm betting that the day they do, the programmers will be very surprised, because I doubt it'll resemble anything any human would think of just by attacking the problem head-on. But who knows.
