[nologic01]

You are masquerading personal preferences (and possibly professional interests) as rules of nature. If anything, Godlike conceit definetely applies to some ML accolytes.

In any case, with your last point "we should allow complex smartness to emerge" you essentially agree with my point that new levels will emerge from orthogonal (new) directions.

The good thing about brute force is that it summons so many resources it primes the way for smarter approaches.

For those not conceited the objective is not some deus-ex-machina but "algorithms that work".

[airgapstopgap]

It is interesting that you don't even hide having strong personal emotional preference at stake. Now, does this not suggest that your predictions are a priori less credible, by your logic?

No, I don't think "orthogonal" directions will be fruitful.

I also disagree on evaluations. What you call brute search is not brute search at all, nor a deux ex machina, it is a lawful and honest method of algorithmic discovery of true regularities. "Smarter approaches", meanwhile, usually amount to stilted expressions of narcissism of researchers overly proud with having come up with shallow tricks aping some aspect of explicit human reasoning. They're not actually smart, nor do they work far outside of the toy distribution for which they were developed.