History of deep machine learning

How and why has the previously unknown machine learning become an actual technological field? Not so long ago, machine learning was a purely academic province with a "population" of barely several hundred scientists scattered across selected universities and laboratories. But by 2012, for a number of reasons that we will talk about without going into mathematics, machine learning has come to the fore. Surprisingly, the New Times front page on machine learning was devoted to it in articles at Forbes and The New Yorker. Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine anything like this in Russia.