It's also not because the probe was constrained in terms of it's computing hardware. If you'd made the hardware a thousand times for powerful, it would have made zero difference to the 'smartness' of the software. Nor is it clear that applying the wonders of the modern AI age - Deep Blue, Watson, AphaGo, would help. They're massively optimized for the one task they're good at and completely useless at anything else.

This is why I'm deeply pessimistic about achieving human level AI any time soon, even within the next 100 years. I'm 50 years old today. AI researchers back when I was born expected to have substantially solved AI as a problem by now, but we're still barely scratching the surface of a very big domain. This accident is a really good demonstration of the limitations of modern computer systems in terms of autonomous independent situational awareness.