History of Ideas in the Science of AI
About this ebook
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 the 'pollination' of concepts across subfields, 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.
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About the author
Luc Steels is one of the early pioneers of AI in Europe. He started his research career in AI in the seventies, studying at the MIT AI laboratory with Marvin Minsky. Returning to Europe, he founded the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1983 and participated intensely in frontier research, which has been shifting continuously: from knowledge representation and expert problem solving, to embodied agents and language evolution. Steels also founded in 1996 the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris which recently branched out to Rome, and was a research fellow at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA) associated with the Institute for Evolutionary Biology. In 2024 he received the EURAI distinguished service award, the highest award for AI in Europe.
Ann Dooms is a mathematician and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. She leads the research group in Mathematics & Data Science, where her own expertise lies in the mathematical foundations of pattern recognition with applications in joint visual and language processing, cryptography and artificial intelligence. She has a long-term FED-tWIN collaboration with the Royal Library of Belgium. Dooms is President of the Education Committee of the European Mathematical Society and Vice-President of the scientific advisory boards of Belgian Defence and Belspo. She was elected as a member of the Jonge Academie and the IEEE Technical Committee in Information Forensics and Security. Dooms has authored in several high-ranked journals and conferences, has written three books on mathematics for the general public and writes a monthly column in EOS Wetenschap and De Tijd.
Remi van Trijp is Research Leader at the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris. His work is situated at the intersection of computational linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on construction grammar, language evolution, and computational models of meaning-making. He develops multi-agent systems that treat language as a complex adaptive system, combining linguistic theory with experimental, evolutionary, and emergentist-symbolic approaches to language understanding. He has participated in several European research projects (including ECAgents, ALEAR, ESSENCE, and MUHAI) and has published extensively in peer-reviewed venues.
