The first AI winter was largely triggered by Minsky in a book he published in 1969, which mathematically proved that single-layer perceptrons couldn't solve non-linear problems. Favorite quote: "Our intuitive judgment is that the extension [to multilayer systems] is sterile."
Yet we had the computational power to run backpropagation in the 1960s and small Transformers in the 1970s (I'm the author of both):
https://github.com/dbrll/Xortran (backprop on IBM 1130, 60s)
https://github.com/dbrll/ATTN-11 (Transformer on PDP-11, 70s)
What was missing wasn't the raw processing power, but the ideas and algorithms themselves. Because funding and research were completely discouraged during the AI winter, neural networks research was left dormant and we lost two decades.
I wonder had we invented transformer architecture back in the 70's or 80's, if the pace of hardware innovation would have naturally slowed AI progression, and given humans decades to slowly adapt, rather than the current tidal wave (that seems to grow in size daily) bearing down on us.