AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been in the general subconscious for eons; Animal Intelligence with Animal God or Geological Intelligence, with rocks or places that have super powers, etc.
More recently, with the creation of Science-Fiction and anticipation, AI has been at the core of humanity’s most vivid dreams/fantasies and fears as a matter of fact.
Technologically speaking, it has been in the works for quite a while too. Neural networks and AI have started to become real sciences (not fictions) with the dawn of IT, but were quickly limited by processing power. It went into “sleep mode” until computers recently became fast enough to make a big step-up in AI. Moore’s law was the fuel of AI.
And also thanks to the amount of available data that came with it.
So it was the rebirth of AI.