By combining substantial innovations in efficiently storing and processing data, the Cambrian explosion of innovation around machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, convolution and specific artificial intelligence, together with a steep drop in the level of effort required to build automatically scaling globally distributed applications, I think we can all agree we're at a pretty interesting place in time. This "perfect triangle" of accelerating factors is making whole classes of previously unassailable problems suddenly tractable, and in some cases pedestrian.