Twenty-first Century Frankenstein

Mary Shelley warned us against the creation of artificial life more than two hundred years ago in her famous ‘Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.’ Like all science fiction turning into reality in this technological era, Victor Frankenstein’s creature seems more real than ever before. Mary Shelley received a lot of criticism for being ahead of her time and age… way too ahead of her time that people believed such a ‘creature’ cease to exist. Theories of animal electricity as a synonym to galvanism were disproved, the world was considered limited.

Artificial Intelligence is the modern version of Victor Frankenstein’s creature, only less hideous. Victor was afraid of his creation the minute he saw its pale-yellow eyes. He had realised his mistake of bringing something to life that instant. But we haven’t, maybe because AI seems more sophisticated, economically viable, helpful and everything fancy but definitely not hideous. All seems rosy until you get pricked by the thorn. The creature wasn’t born a monster. Devoid of parental love, it became one. We wouldn’t have to bother about robots asking for love, obviously because they are just objects. They have no feelings! Until we decide to make them more human like, and program them with human emotion.

Even though Victor tried to build a human, it could only merely pass as a creature, an animal with extreme emotions, a monster. No matter how accurately humans may try to build a bot that learns new information on its own and experiences a wide range of emotions, its understanding of a given situation will always be limited. That is the beauty of the human mind, it has the power of the sixth sense. Frankenstein’s monster learns about human life after closely watching a family’s activities and now craves for that love and warmth he sees from his father or creator who abandoned him the day he came to life. Now think of a piece of tech, craving the same attention from you all day, wanting to be loved, getting jealous if you spend more time with something else. We must remember, AI is built to be much more powerful and more efficient than the common man, thus the consequences of their negative emotions can be devastating.

When the monster comes out of hiding to meet the family he had been closely watching, it is treated with more brutality than ever before. These events make the monster realise he can never be one of us, that he can never be a human and vows vengeance, killing all the people his creator loved. Research from universities like Carnegie Mellon shows how people usually react towards an unsupervised robot or when AI takes over a person’s job. Everyone, from a child to an adult tries to violently break or attack the robot. Let us say, the reasons are insecurities or simply the inborn tendency of a species to protect themselves and others of the same species against a potential threat. If this is the sixth sense acting, it isn’t wrong. AI may try as much, but it can never be one of us. And it won’t take this intelligence very long to realise this, given the fact that we already have several sources like movies that showcase the relationship between humans have with robots. AI in its limits is the greatest inventions of all times and Mary Shelley will be proud! But it is, after all a machine, similar to the unorthodox progeny of Victor Frankenstein.