Artificial Intelligence: Frankenstein’s Creature for our Century?

The word ‘robot’ entered world literature in 1921 through a play, RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Capek. It is well known that the 1930’s Frankenstein produced by James Whale appears in the context of a growing public fascination with film characters such as Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1919), (Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, 1922 and Maria in (Metropolis, 1927).

These characters were either robots or evil hypnotists who turned people into robots. Today, the Monster takes on a new role as the bogeyman of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is the Frankenstein’s creature for our century. It will develop and grow and become powerful enough to not only kill its maker, but all of humanity.

The creature is a ‘super-intelligence’. Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein: Or The New Prometheus even describes the creature as ‘superhuman’ in speed, but of course that is only its physicality. Yet we are witness in the novel to the rapid cognitive and affective development of the creature after its assembly, activation and then rejection by Dr Frankenstein. He learns language by secretly observing, through a hole in a wall of a cottage, the De Laceys, a family of French and Turkish refugees, who were hiding in the woods near Ingolstadt.