# Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power **Entity class:** Scholarly seminar and publication lineage **Domain:** History of artificial intelligence / history of science **Doc Type:** Developed Initiative Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power** was a 2020–2021 Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at the University of Cambridge, organized across the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Faculty of English. Its participants examined artificial intelligence through labor, colonialism, race, gender, political economy, classification, and institutional power. A published synthesis appeared in _BJHS Themes_ in 2023. ## Project X Context The seminar demonstrates that scholars have already traced long historical lineages connecting Babbage, management science, computation, automation, and contemporary AI. [[articles/A History of Machine Intelligence|A History of Machine Intelligence]] joins this scholarship to a distinct question: how documented objectives are transmitted through builders, institutions, substrate, and national programs. ## Evidence Ledger - **Established:** Cambridge convened the seminar in 2020–2021 and published its synthesis in 2023. - **Established:** Its program treated AI as a genealogy of power with histories older than contemporary machine learning. - **Strongly indicated:** The Project X continuity argument and the Cambridge genealogy share a historical field while assigning different analytical emphasis to purpose, labor, power, and inheritance. - **Unresolved:** The degree of direct influence between this scholarly network and the revised Project X synthesis; citation and correspondence records would settle that relationship. ## Sources / Provenance - University of Cambridge, [“Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power”](https://www.ai.hps.cam.ac.uk/). - Syed Mustafa Ali et al., [“Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power” (2023)](https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2023.15). - [[articles/A History of Machine Intelligence|A History of Machine Intelligence]]. ## Relationships - **Includes the scholarly context of:** [[wiki/Simon Schaffer|Simon Schaffer]], Jonnie Penn, Matteo Pasquinelli, Richard Staley, Sarah Dillon, Matthew Jones, and Stephanie Dick. - **Intersects with:** [[wiki/Anti-Teleology Norm|Anti-Teleology Norm]]. - **Informs:** [[wiki/Project X - Machine Intelligence History|Project X - Machine Intelligence History]].