Um, I could be wrong, but I think that most of the data controlling how
the human mind works is inside the genome... even if it needs external,
environmental triggers. You are correct in that even if we understand
the genome, we might still need some understanding of external
environment in order to build an AI from it... but I think that external
understanding could be hacked up over a few hours. Night and day, motor
feedback, sociovisual interaction... seems fairly easy, relative to
figuring out how the genes start a cascade of neural evolution that ends
up in a person. Compare writing a user interface and disentangling
several million lines of assembly language evolved via evolutionary
computation when nobody really knows how the task is being performed.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.