the pinnacle of AI at
the time. In 1980, an
Expert System called
XCON was reported to
be saving its company
- the Digital Equipment
Corporation - over 40
million dollars annually
by 1986.8
While the advances in
AI were intense, there
was still however nothing to suggest that
robots and AI had a
future together as one
symbiotic being. Robots
and Expert Systems
were still two different
things, and no matter how useful Expert
10
Systems proved to be,
they were still only
collections of pre-programmed data - highly
intelligent data, yes, but they still weren’t
learning anything.