Nature succeeded in creating human-level intelligence with one trick and no understanding, so clearly it can be done. It did take a while though. More tricks and more understanding would probably help speed things up.
The "one trick" is evolution. Interestingly, that is a field of ML that is currently relatively ignored. I'm hearing people make similar arguments about evolutionary patterns for ML that were once applied to neural networks. There isn't enough compute. It is too hard to consider using evolutionary patterns. The state of the field expressed at conferences is sad. Etc.
