My hypothesis is that we will soon see the emergence of a super-human artificial intelligence, not because of some astounding breakthroughs in our understanding of intelligence, but because of irrefutable proof that humans just aren't all that complicated to surpass.
I don't think it's so contradictory, we have a long history of stumbling into technological advancement. We have a tendency to get ahead of ourselves before we even understand what we're doing.
Setting aside the creativity aspect (ie where do brand new ideas come from), which is a minuscule fraction of human thought, I suspect we are good pattern matching machines with the ability of extrapolation.
I think with sufficient data that computers can understand, this is eminently replicable.