we are merely standing on the first step of a very tall ladder.

...

    Deep learning may not be intelligence is any real sense, but it's still working considerably better than anybody could have anticipated just a few years ago. Now, if only we understood why... ;-)

Yes I'd agree with this, there needs to be a deeper level analysis for how the cognitive functions within the brain, for example how vision in the brain works. Such understanding will clearly take a great amount of effort to achieve, and I don't know if research enough research is aimed in this deeper theoretical direction, as opposed to neural net type machine learning.