genuine question (asking because i have a biased perspective): why dont you consider advances in ai to be a major shift? in the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in capabilities in computer vision, language understanding, robotics, etc.
a complementary reading piece should be sutton's "the bitter lesson", which more or less argues that ai methods/techniques that "leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin."
in my experience, most people dismiss cyc as a failed science experiment. this shouldnt be! after all, many important deep learning concepts have their roots in the 80s, and it is possible that cyc could be revived too.
same here, although i know unity has been staffing up their ml team eg arthur juliani doing good work at unity. more generally speaking, i think there is a clear need for reliable, robust simulators in ml. (openai released a few interesting environments a few years back but adoption seems to have plateaued, from my perspective.)