Only about two percent of the Linux kernel was personally written by Linus Torvalds. Building a mind seems like it ought to be more difficult than building an operating system.

There is no law of Nature that says the consequences must be commensurate with their cause. We live in an unsupervised universe where a movement of butterfly's wings can determine the future of nations. You can't conclude that simply because the effect is expected to be vast, the cause ought to be at least prominent. This knowledge may only be found by a more mechanistic route.