Computers to generate new hypotheses from existing data?

Everyone is talking about how we are now overwhelmed with available data, including an ever increasing number of scientific publications. Humans just can not keep up. There is now a growing effort to use computers to make sense of all this data, even to the point of using computers to generate new scientific hypotheses. If computers can logic out the patterns, for example, in the published literature between different discplines, they may be able to suggest new avenues of research.

This is the subject of nice article in the Guardian:

Web-crawling computers will soon be calling the shots in science
Within a decade, computers will be able to plough through scientific data looking for patterns and connections – then tell scientists what they should do next

The articles is a response to an article in Science by James Evans and Andrey Rzhetsky of the University of Chicago called "Machine Science".