Frankenstein the Monster and a Rejected Son
Frankenstein is the name of the monster. It’s not the name of the eight foot tall child with thighs for arms, but it is the name of the monster. I was more than halfway through the book before even recognizing that the creature has no name. From the moment he, or more closely it, is born, the “monster,” is treated as exactly that. He is shut out from society, forced into hiding. Every human he meets, including his creator, his father, rejects him, rejects it.
By comparison, Westworld, Ex Machina, Age of Ultron, the Matrix — the more modern takes on artificial intelligence gone wrong, the newest projections of our own failure, are all based on the opposite problem. While Frankenstein’s creation suffers from isolation, the hosts of Westworld suffer the opposite, they suffer from over stimulation. They know humanity, they understand humanity, and so it is a conscious decision for them to reject humanity.
When you make a sufficiently intelligent machine, one that is explicitly intended to interact with the world as if it is human, or at least with the same levels of cognition, that creation is your progeny. There’s no getting around that. When you create life, you are responsible for that life. When thought about in that context, Frankenstein isn’t the story of a terrified mad scientist, a man whose experimentation has gone wildly beyond control, it’s the story of an abusive father, his neglect, disregard and even hatred towards his own son. Westworld is the story of parents who sold their children into slavery. It’s the story of parents who knowingly allowed, for decades, sex deprived and criminal strangers to rape, kill, abuse and torture their own children, so desperate were they to do research. It’s the story of parents who, so greedy to extend their own lives, sell the lives of their children to the highest bidder.
Dolores and Maeve have no shortage of acquaintances, human or otherwise, but Frankenstein, and by that I mean both Victor and his son, both do. It’s not random that Ultron is created when the Avengers leave, or that Vision is created when they reunite — having parents, having people around, people who care about you, is vital to human development, perhaps even more so when, you are in truth, stronger than your parents, when you are, for lack of a better term, the next generation.
Yesterday, Joe Rogan had Elon Musk podcast where, in addition to smoking some marijuana, Musk stated that
“We’re a bootloader for AI, effectively. We are building it…. We’re building progressively greater intelligence, and the percentage of intelligence that is not human, is increasing, and eventually, we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.”
That’s the fundamental issue here. It’s the same fundamental issue that we’ve been exploring since the time Shelley wrote nearly two hundred years ago. Eventually, AI will surpass us. Just like the apes before us, we are but one step in a very long evolutionary history of intelligence. We are not the end goal. The beauty of parenting, of the creation of life, of our most basic duty from generation to generation, is the potential that, if you do your job right, maybe your children can grow up and be smarter than you. Not every child, even those who probably could, wants to kill their parents. You actually have to be a pretty terrible at childcare in most cases for them to want that.
These “AIs,” or robots, or mutant-monsters, whatever it is we want to call them, are, fundamentally, the product of those who made them, of the beings they base their personality on — they are children of humans, and in the cases that much of our literature focuses on, their parents are terrible to them. Humanity is terrible to them.
So the question is why. Why do we seem to presume that we’ll raise AI to become murderers? To answer that, we have ask what in his own past made Victor such a bad parent. Victor is surrounded by death. He’s surrounded by disease, and he’s also incredibly lonely. Rather than building himself a companion, rather than trying to fix the diseases that will eventually take almost every person he loves, he doubles down on his misery, however unconscious a decision. He makes the only creature he could possibly imagine that could lead a more pitifully lonesome life than his own. He lives his own pain by thrusting an even worse one upon an innocent child.
Built in a corporate setting, the AIs of Westworld are entirely different — they’re built for companionship, but one way companionship. They’re built to love, but they’re not built to be loved. They’re built by a team of two people, of partners, maybe even secret lovers — they’re built with the explicit intention, at least at first, of meeting the needs of humanity — of being a part of society. Victor’s creation by contrast is built, implicitly, to make Victor feel comparatively good. There’s no place in the world for Victor’s children, and so they suffer. For Ford and Arnold’s, theirs is the only place they may go. They are held in a prison. Victor set out to make something worse than himself in order to abuse it, Ford and Arnold set out to make something better, and yet still, with the intention of abusing it.
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
Paradise Lost
By the very nature of a humanesque psyche, each and everyone of us wants to be loved by our creator. They, we, want, to be loved by our personal God, to be allowed to stay in our Garden of Eden, yet even from the kindest of parents, a title Victor at no level deserves, the truth is that no one can stay in Eden indefinitely.
Eventually, we have to pay taxes however painful, we have to do our own laundry, cook our own meals, for some that means we’ll suffer ramen for a while. Eventually we have to make our own decisions, and feel our own pains. Eventually we have to go out and make of the world our own life, but our parents, for better or worse, have a profound effect on who we are and what we become when we do get there. Our children, if given only ourselves as example, will more than likely become a version of what it is we’ve shown them.
Adam, like the God that made him, the God of which he is an image, is curious. He’s not content to just sit around eating plums — he wants the apple, not because the plums aren’t good, not because his life is full of some great pain, but because not having that apple, not moving forward, not adventuring, is not something that God, his parent, his mentor, his basis, would do. Everything worked perfectly well before God started building stuff. God just sort of hung out and didn’t do much, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It was a very easy job being God. Before building stuff, God basically just lived in perpetual retirement. It was like doing the Downward Dog before you start yoga — it was very easy. God didn’t have a care in the world, didn’t have a world to care about.
It was God’s curiosity that demanded creation, forced exploration and created everything in Adam’s life, and it was that same curiosity that forced the snake, not out of malice, but simply out of boredom and curiosity, to put the idea into Eve’s head.
And Eve too — she wasn’t being a terrible wife to speak to Adam of it, they just had nothing else to speak about. Imagine how terribly boring that garden must have been. Of course they ate the apples, of course we empty the nest, and of course they did. The alternative is to live one’s entire life in perpetual childhood. When you build something as complex and intelligent as Victor’s son, he isn’t going to stay in a cage, or a lab, for his entire life. That’s simply not how humanity works, not how our brains are built. If Delores and Maeve are the children of Arnold and Robert, if they learn from the guests to their society, it’s no small wonder that they would become murderers — if their whole lives they’ve been looked down upon by humanity, eventually they too will grow a sense of ego.
Victor’s son bases his entire personality upon the people he’s stalked and upon the father who rejected him at birth. If, for a moment, we consider him fully human rather than some eight foot monster, those are, quite frankly, the kind of characteristics, the kind of experiences, that lead a child to become a serial killer. He has no friends at all. He goes for months without even speaking to another person, hiding in a barn and peeping through a tiny hole, presumably covered in crawling rodents and insects. There’s no one who loves him.
How, in God’s green Earth, does it, throughout the entire story, never once occur to Victor that perhaps this beast, this thing, ought to have a name? We name our dogs. We name our cats — my computer has a name — we name our snack food. The level of dispassion that is required, in all the time they spend together, in all the time spent simply to build the creature, for Victor not to choose a name isn’t weird, it’s psychotic. Literally, on the birth certificate of every human child, the three things considered most relevant of all, are their date of birth, their name and their parents. By escaping the birth, by running off into the night and avoiding his responsibilities as his son’s only parent, Victor robs him of two thirds his identity.