I think a realistic expectation is for our ability to perform inductive inference to develop faster (in a sense) than our ability to do the other parts of machine intelligence (i.e. tree pruning and evaluation). In which case, all realistic routes to machine intelligence would get there through an oracle-like stage. Inductive inference is cross-domain and will be used everywhere—fuelling its development.
I think a realistic expectation is for our ability to perform inductive inference to develop faster (in a sense) than our ability to do the other parts of machine intelligence (i.e. tree pruning and evaluation). In which case, all realistic routes to machine intelligence would get there through an oracle-like stage. Inductive inference is cross-domain and will be used everywhere—fuelling its development.