[Animats]

The success of deep learning might be something of a curse

Possibly. In AI, someone has a good idea, there's great enthusiasm, people in the field predict Strong AI Real Soon Now, the good idea hits a ceiling, and then people are stuck for a while. AI has been through four cycles of that. The ceiling of the current cycle may be in sight.

The next big problem is, as they say, "safety", or "common sense". Nobody really has a handle on how to do that yet. Checking proposed explorations against a simulation of some kind works if you can simulate the world well enough. Outside that niche, it's hard.

Collecting vast amounts of data to predict what can go wrong without an underlying model runs into combinatorial limits. More things can go wrong than you are likely to be able to observe.

Good that there are people thinking about this.