Current process seems purely political with massive rents extraction ($100k for a degree, loan guarantees), almost naked votes buying (subsidies, "free" plan for whatever). And moral arguments are used mostly for cover (non-dischargeable debts?).
Perhaps we can sidestep those problems, or at least escape from them for a while.
But we can't. Any decision we make -- even one based purely on data -- is a political one, because we can choose to change the data by changing society. If you say we should make future decisions (which affect lives and future data) based on current correlations only, you're executing a conservative political policy of maintaining the status quo. If you program computers to just take into account existing data (and not, say, desired future outcomes for society), you're programming conservative computers.
Also, the computer programs take into account the desired outcomes and the information they can obtain experimentally (through A/B testing for example), not just existing data.
Because feature-learning problems in the setting of nearly-unlimited sets of possible features are very hard.