AI’s Triple Helix: Narratives, Technologies, and Law

How do imaginaries, industrial trajectories, and regulation co-produce the contemporary AI landscape? This track weaves three vantage points to unpack systemic dynamics. First, it probes science-fiction as a generator of entrepreneurial visions and institutionalized creativity in AI, and its ambivalent technophilic/technophobic motifs shaping innovation agendas. Second, using patent co-classification networks, it examines AI’s tightening coupling with medical instrumentation, highlighting a center – periphery structure dominated by AI, asymmetric cognitive flows, and a shift from exploration to exploitation as trajectories consolidate. Third, it assesses the European AI Act’s high-risk regime as both potential brake and lever for competitiveness, and as a strategic instrument in the EU’s positioning vis-à-vis the US and China. Together, these perspectives foreground AI as a socio-technical system whose futures are co-shaped by cultural imaginaries, industrial path dependencies, and public rule-making.