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The Believers: Behind the Rise of Neural Nets
An anonymous reader writes Deep learning is dominating the news these days, but it's quite possible the field could have died if not for a mysterious call that Geoff Hinton, now at Google, got one night in the 1980s: "You don't know me, but I know you," the mystery man said. "I work for the System Development Corporation. We want to fund long-range speculative research. We're particularly interested in research that either won't work or, if it does work, won't work for a long time. And I've been reading some of your papers." The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a readable profile of the minds behind neural nets, from Rosenblatt to Hassabis, told primarily through Hinton's career.
No mystery caller was responsible for neural nets taking off. Computers exist to compute as extensions of ourselves, a neural net is the way to extend more of ourselves into the computational system. Saying "neural nets wouldn't exist if x didn't call y in the middle of the night" is a bit like saying "the if statement wouldn't exist if the orignal person to think of the word 'if' didn't exist" - it filled a role so it was a natural advancement and the stranger thing would be it not existing.