The question as posed does not strike me as one of worry, but of curiosity: what ARE the seminal works that the different fields point to as being the "bibles" of their discipline? Comp. Sci. has Knuth, Russel and Norvig, etc. Other fields most certainly have their own, and knowing which those are is interesting and worth getting an answer to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...
I'd say: every discipline has it's most fundamental memes
1. Historically foundational: books that brought important ideas, introduced a new branch, progressed the maths significantly. You can read them these days, but their content, proofs, language, etc. is not up to date. Examples: Elements by Euclid, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Newton, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae by Gauss.
2. Modern foundational books: The ones that can be used for studying now. Books that are clearly written, popular, cover their subject well. Examples: Visual Complex Analysis, Spivak’s Calculus, Linear Algebra Done Right, Hardy’s An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers.
They are usually hugely influential in their times but have been refined or made easier to digest since. If you care deeply about your field you should read them at some point to see how ideas evolved historically.
English: Shakespeare
Biology: Darwin's Origin of Species
Math: Euclid's Elements
For OP's topic, I'd say Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is up there for computer science.
The one thing that I've found with some of these "fundamental" books is that there are gems of information that can be very helpful for specific problems.
For instance, Landau and Lifshitz's statistical mechanics book has first-rate description of entropy and multiplicity. And TAOCP has an incredibly thorough discussion of combinatorics that I found invaluable.
I dispute this idea. For some disciplines, this may be so. For other, such as physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, civil engineering, poetry...actually, for most disciplines they aren't based on fundamental books. They're based on a living community of practice.
In these disciplines a book is important only insofar as it can be used to increase your abilities. No one goes and studies the textual details of Landau & Lifshitz as a guide to anything, any more than they do so with TAOCP.
Rather than worry about fundamental books, worry about opening up black boxes at a steady rate.