It seems clear that were limited by access to data and computer power. That has largely changed. However, the hard part has always been around deciding what question to ask and how to score the result. This requires domain knowledge and a scientific process (conjecture, measure, analyze, repeat). There is no magic bullet just better tools. Someone still has to define the problem and solution. Just look at IBM Watson and what a failure that is. They did okay on Jeopardy because they spent years optimizing for just that. Jeopardy could have changed the way they wrote clues by including irony and other language constructs and the humans would have done fine and Watson would have bombed.
