Finding statistical relationships between large numbers of concepts and sensory inputs just doesn't scale well compared to doing a bunch of calculus to predict an control movement of the body.

Really? Correlation is just multiplying and adding, which both scale well and parallelize trivially. Scaling the calculus required to control pendulums is far less pretty- going from 1 to 2 makes the problem chaotic, and I imagine 3 is even less pretty. This looks like a common problem to give students, so the double pendulum can't be that difficult. My feeling, though, is that the toughest solved sensorimotor problems are a lot 'easier' than the toughest solved machine learning problems.