No "decades of disappointment" – AI has been steadily improving; it's the world that's changed

I just offered a rewrite of a paragraph in the schedule of a meeting I've been invited to.  I have no idea whether they'll take mine, but this take deserves to get published somewhere so here it is.  I was responding to an original that basically said that after "decades of disappointment", deep learning had saved the day.  Here's my suggested replacement.
What's New?  Despite enormous fluctuations in public profile based on misconceptions by scientists and lay people alike, AI has been making steady progress for decades since its inception in the 1950s.  Recent breakthroughs in machine learning techniques, computational power, and systems design have resulted in a sudden high profile as the outputs of AI become recognisably more human-like.  The technology that underlies much of the success of the world's highest market capital firms (Google, Apple, Microsoft) has not been born overnight, but the prevalence of data, computation, and communication has created a fundamental shift in the power and availability of artificial intelligence, and its impact on everyday lives.
 For evidence of the above, see Miles Brundage's slides from AAAI 2016. Hopefully someday he'll write the paper!

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