Deep learning took off in the last 10 years, but the idea has been around for more than 50 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#History
It's also interesting to think that we may have a lot of ideas like that. They are just waiting patiently for compute in some small communities.
And the compute quite consistently grows exponentially. We will make bigger absolute increases in compute in next 5 years than we did ever before.