There are very good reasons why it took this long, but can be summed up as: everyone was looking in the wrong place. Deep learning breaks a hundred years of statistical intuition, and you don't move a ship that large quickly.

There is, but it is fractured. I would equate this effort as more of a standardization of terms and language.

Calling it “a product of human engineering” is misleading. Deep learning exploits principles we don’t fully understand. We didn’t engineer those principles. It’s not fundamentally any different than particle physics or biology, which are both similarly consequences of rules that we didn’t invent and can’t control.