Frankenstein & Silicon Valley
Victor Frankenstein’s warning for budding Entrepreneurs
The classic gothic novel Frankenstein is considered to be the first science fiction novel. It was penned in 1818 by a 21 year old Mary Shelley, wife of poet Percy Shelley, and daughter of women right’s advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein is an epistolary novel, as it reveals through letters of an Arctic seafarer, Robert Walton, the story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein, who in his scientfic inquisitiveness had created a living breathing creature of his own.
Although omitted in many new editions, the novel has the subtitle of The Modern Prometheus.
Prometheus, whose name means forethought, is the creator of humankind in Greek Mythology. Aeschylus, in his trilogy Prometheus, considers Prometheus an immortal god, the friend of the human race, the giver of fire, the inventor of the useful arts, an omniscient seer, an heroic sufferer, who is overcome by the superior power of Zeus, but will not bend his inflexible mind.
The term “Modern Prometheus” was originally created by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, referring to Benjamin Franklin and his experiments with electricity.
“What can stop the determined heart and the resolved will of man?”
-Frankenstein
Prometheus represents human striving, especially for scientific knowledge, coupled with the risk of unintended and unfortunate consequences. This desire is found both in both characters of the novel: Walton and Victor. Walton in his second letter writes to his sister:
There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious-painstaking-a workman to execute with perserverence and labour: but besides this, there is a love for the marvelous, interwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathaways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.
And Victor Frankenstein states his reasons for his scientific pursuits:
I confess that neither the structure of languages, nor the code of governments, nor the politics of various states, possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or, in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.
Victor shows the glories of the act of discovery for a man of invention:
wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!
It is almost as if Victor Frankestein is Walton coming back from the future, warning his old self to not undertake in a mad pursuit of science.
From the first letter we can confer that Walton is ambitious and through his scientific discoveries, wants to make his mark in the world, specifically in the field of magnetism. He considers that this new knowledge will bestow a great gift to humanity and progress. And this is what this novel is about: “Progress at what cost?” It showcases the result when the scientific forgets to account for the philosophical and the moral. Advancement of the sake of advancement certainly has its repercussions.
Victor Frankenstein is the voice of the moral, the one who went on the journey of blind scientific idealism, and after facing cruel repercussions, comes back a changed man.
I believe all Silicon Valley engineers/entrepreneurs should read this novel as it would not only help them derive valuable life lessons but also assist them in making the right choices when it comes to developing new technologies.
