At the Crossroads of Multiple Histories

The Problem of Incomplete Narratives

Project Avalon responds to a triple frustration:

The reductive Western vision: The history of AI told only through Dartmouth (1956) and Turing (1950) renders invisible centuries of contributions from other cultures and eras.

Inaccessible complexity: Works like those of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (Calculating Empires) do trace back to 1500, but their dense infographic format makes it difficult for non-expert audiences to engage with. Their timeline, while brilliant, can be overwhelming.

The absence of a popular narrative: Between academic textbooks and press articles focused on immediate news, there was a missing format—one that is accessible, narrative-driven, and that allows readers to understand how and why AI fits into a millennia-old human history.

The Project's Central Thesis

History-AI rests on a simple but radical proposition: artificial intelligence is not a recent phenomenon, but the continuation of humanity's millennia-old quest to automate thought and encode intelligence into matter.

This expanded definition allows us to:

- Trace back to antiquity (Hero of Alexandria's automata, divination mechanisms)

- Include non-Western contributions (Al-Jazari, African numeral systems)

- Understand cycles of innovation and forgetting linked to wars, conquests, and library destructions

Editorial Positioning

The project deliberately positions itself in the field of popular science education:

- Language: French first (then English)

- Audience: Curious readers without technical background

- Length: Articles of ~1,500 words (long-form format, counterintuitive in the age of short attention spans)

- Style: Narrative, with extended metaphors

- Approach: Historical rigor with maximum accessibility

Conceptual Architecture

To tell the story of AI over two millennia, we had to accept that it sits at the intersection of four distinct histories:

- History of computing

- History of information

- History of technology

- General history

This interdisciplinary approach involves:

- Cross-referencing sources from the history of science, political history, and the history of technology

- Contextualizing each innovation within its era (wars, conquests, cultural exchanges)

- Identifying moments of rupture, acceleration, and forgetting