I think it's more likely that we will do machine learning to learn the syntactic structure, rather than hand craft these pieces of machinery. For a long time we have tried to create intelligent machines by designing to solve a problem, now at last we are designing machines to solve problems and finding success. I see no reason to imagine that going back to the old school methods, with a layer of the new magic on top is going to be effective as we move to the medium term - in the short term, possibly, but briefly.