I recognize it was not meant to be a history of AI but many readers may have thought that this was new stuff. Very little is new in any significant sense...except the money that somehow woke up...I think because of the NLP stuff and the repeated demonstrations that classical statistics has been overrun by human style computations. We knew all this many years ago but nobody believed us. A good book to read that is more balanced historially is Terry Sejnowski's Deep Learning Revolution. Here is my review of that book.

https://medium.com/liecatcher/learning-deep-learning-bd883aa884b9

Here is my dissertation from 1976.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16Uk3xxEQpivMa1mYXNO4GqrtPk4YdZYS/view

("encode" is the word used for "recognition") read Chapt 4 Speculation. Nobody would publish any of this work. It was regarded as incomprehensible ... to quote the rejections.

My first published paper on this stuff was in 1973 for work I did in 1970 as an honors project at Emory University...it investigated verbal and visual intermodal processing by the brain. I was by no means the first person thinking along all these lines and doing real work for many years. (See my dissertation).