What are Expert Systems? - Moral Robots

In our continuing series on the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence, today we take a closer look at'expert systems,' a somewhat (but not entirely) obsolete branch of symbolic AI. For a long time, expert systems were the most promising, highest-hyped products of AI research. But both the philosophical attacks by Dreyfus, Winograd and others, as well as a lingering sense of the failure of expert systems to deliver on their promises contributed to the 80's disillusionment with AI -- what has since been dubbed the "AI winter," and that ended only with the advent of deep learning in the early 2010s. Expert systems are rule-based inference machines for particular domains of knowledge. They are intended to replace "experts" in that domain.