What if the two true architects of Artificial Intelligence were Spanish, had been born in the same year (1852)… and official history had erased them?

In 1912, a Spanish engineer built the first machine in history capable of deciding for itself: El Ajedrecista, by Leonardo Torres Quevedo. In 1894, an Aragonese physician formulated the principle that today allows neural networks to learn: Santiago Ramón y Cajal wrote that “every man can, if he set his mind to it, be the sculptor of his own brain.” Decades before Turing, Shannon, von Neumann, or Zuse, they had already drawn the complete blueprint of AGI.

This book recovers, with rigor and passion, what the Anglo-Saxon world failed to recognize.

What you will discover:

How Torres Quevedo invented remote control (Telekino, 1903), conditional branching (1911), floating point (1914), and the first automaton that played and won — technologies that Shannon and Samuel would cite half a century later.

How Cajal drew the retina as nature’s first convolutional network, inferred the synapse, and formulated the plasticity that is now the foundation of deep learning.

Why Transformers, LLMs such as GPT or Claude, humanoid robots, and multimodal agents are direct heirs to three Spanish patents filed between 1907 and 1934.

The “Great Silence” after 1936: how a Civil War and the absence of disciples buried one of the most important scientific legacies of the 20th century.

What is still missing to achieve true AGI, and where the clues Cajal and Quevedo had already left behind can be found.
A book written from inside the revolution.

David Vivancos has spent 30 years on the front line of Artificial Intelligence. An entrepreneur since 1995, founder of five startups, creator of MindBigData (the world’s largest open dataset of brain signals), author of 7 books, speaker at more than 500 conferences across Europe and the United States, advisor to 35+ CEOs on the transition to an automated world. A teacher of machines with more than 28,000 hours devoted to researching AGI.

This is not a history book. It is the lost manual of artificial intelligence, told by someone who has spent three decades building the future these two men imagined.

12 chapters. almost 500 pages (in the print version). Exhaustive glossary. More than one hundred references.

From the childhood of two boys born in the same year in different corners of Spain, to the Cajal-Quevedo fusion of 1943 that gave rise to the Perceptron. From Simarro’s Madrid kitchen-laboratory to today’s wetware at Cortical Labs. From the Niagara Whirlpool Aero Car (still in service) to the agents that now navigate your screen.

Why read it now.

We are living through the greatest technological transformation in human history. Understanding where it comes from tells us where it is going. Recognizing those who opened the path is not nostalgia: it is justice, perspective, and advantage.

If you are interested in AI, neuroscience, the history of science, or simply want to understand the world that is coming, this book will change the way you look at it.

Join us in reclaiming the first architects of AGI. A century late, but still in time.