Yes, that was the beginning.
And the more I read, the more I am convinced that we will not have to wait for the next decade to see #autopoietic systems capable of self-reference and -development.
My gut feeling from what I have read (and studied of the former) natural-language learning and how infants learn to "grasp reality", is that this will happen very swiftly when we let even only a couple of #robots, connected...