Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence in Europe

While artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology has been gaining widespread media and popular attention, its historical analysis is still in its infancy. As Jon Agar noted, “There is a surprising absence in the secondary literature of survey histories of artificial intelligence written by professional historians of science” [4, p. 291].1 When we began our own project on the history of AI in the Federal Republic of Germany,2 we found that we had to agree: Each project member—there are five of us (Florian Müller, Dinah Pfau, Helen Piel, Rudolf Seising, and Jakob Tschandl)—individually investigates one subject area of AI and has often found little historical work.3 What is more, the available histories, both monographs and articles, strongly focus on US developments (occasionally including British developments, Alan Turing, and Donald Michie) and are often written by practitioners and nonhistorians [12], [14], [16], [25], [34], [42], [63]. This prevalence of practitioner (as well as popular) accounts is being replicated outside the US too [9], [10], [11], [53]. While valuable as sources, these can only be a first step toward a thorough historical analysis of AI that extends beyond its US origins. This Special Issue therefore collects several histories of AI in Europe by historians and media theorists.