The expert systems boom

Expert systems moved out of the laboratory.

By the mid-1980s, hundreds of expert systems were being used in industry.

A food company used one to find faults in machines that sterilized canned food. An oil-services company used another to interpret measurements from deep inside oil wells.

These were not demonstrations of general intelligence. They were narrow rulebooks doing paid, operational work.

The narrower bet was useful enough to become a business.