Artificial Intelligence, why now?

I mentioned in my last article that Artificial Intelligence is a large field, to get to being a large field it must have been around for some time, which it has. The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was coined in 1956 at the Dartmouth Conference (New Hampshire) by Stanford University Professor John McCarthy (although he was an assistant professor at Dartmouth at the time). You could argue that AI has deep roots in Formal Reasoning but that would open up a huge philosophical debate and would probably take significantly more space and time to write and read! So why now, if AI has been around for 70 years what has changed in the past few years that has propelled AI into the mainstream? The answer is that the perfect wave has hit, three things have come together to give us the adoption rates that we see.