In the wake of his Calewaert chair, Luc Steels published a book on the history of AI, together with Ann Dooms and Remi van Trijp. There are still copies available, so in case you are interested in obtaining one, please contact Ann Dooms. However, a PDF is also available for free.
From the back cover:
The story of Artificial Intelligence is often told as a march of breakthroughs and inevitable progress. This book begs to differ. It looks beneath the headlines to trace AI as a living web of research threads, where ideas emerge, mutate, recombine, and sometimes fade from view.
By introducing conceptual tools such as phylo-epistemic networks and a series of carefully chosen case studies – ranging from mathematical reasoning to modelling language as a complex adaptive system – this book proposes a new framework for understanding how techno-scientific research fields function. These tools reveal how shifts in meaning, unlikely recombinations, and seemingly abandoned approaches have continually expanded AI’s “adjacent possible”.
By understanding the history of AI as a living epistemic ecosystem, this book also sets its eyes on the future. As today’s dominant paradigms crowd out alternatives, the field’s epistemic diversity grows fragile. By treating AI’s past not as a closed chapter but as a living resource, this book invites readers to think differently about what AI is — and what it could become.