Governing the Memory Engine: A History of AI through its Governance

Most histories of artificial intelligence follow one of two paths. Internalist accounts narrate a cumulative progression toward thinking machines; critical accounts diagnose the extraction, labour and surveillance on which today’s systems rest. This lecture presents a third approach, from my book in progress The Inventions of a Future: a history of AI centred not on intelligence but on memory. From the symbolic programs of the 1950s to today’s generative models, AI can be read as an effort to make the archive act: to keep the past in a form that produces decisions. This effort has taken three forms, or memory regimes: rules written by experts and held inside the program; statistical engines coupled to databases they read but do not contain; and large models that absorb their archives into their parameters.

Rather than retelling the technical history, the lecture tests this framework on a question it was not built for: the governance of AI. It argues that governance has attached, in each regime, to wherever memory sits. Funders audited programs whose rules they could read; data-protection law governed files and the decisions drawn from them; courts and legislators now work around models whose memory cannot be separated from the machine, through training data, memorized outputs and computing thresholds. Governance does not only constrain: funding, academic legitimacy, commercial and civil law have also made each regime possible, often before any friction revealed there limits. The lecture closes by asking what the framework explains, where it strains, and who governs AI when memory can no longer be read.

This event is part of the Events Series “The Humanities and Social Science Meet AI.”

Speaker: Mathieu HUSSON is an agrégé in mathematics and holds a doctorate in history. He is a CNRS researcher at the Paris Observatory – PSL, working within the history of astronomy team at the Laboratoire Temps Espace. His scholarship focuses on the history of mathematics and astronomy in late medieval Western Europe (1200–1500), examining source criticism, historiography, and computational instruments. For over a decade, Husson has worked at the intersection of history and digital tools, notably directing the ERC ALFA project and developing the DISHAS information system. Blending technical acumen with historical inquiry, he serves on the steering committee of Université PSL’s DHAI (Digital Humanities meets AI) initiative and, since 2025, acts as Scientific Deputy for AI at the CNRS Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (INSHS).

Discussant: Thorben PELZER, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, Division ot Humanities (HKUST).

Date: 13 November 2026
Time: 2:00pm–4:00pm
Location: xxxx