AI and the Frankenstein Delusion

In the 1931 film Frankenstein, partly based on Mary Shelly’s novel, the hero,  Henry Frankenstein (Victor is from the novel) with the help of his bizarre hunchback assistant, Fritz, has collected the body parts of dead people, sewn them together and created a creature.

He then elevates the creature (played by Boris Karloff) up into a tower where lightning can strike large plasma orbs that surround him and, in a dramatic flourish energises the dead form. “It’s alive” screams the manic Henry in one of the most famous scenes in cinema history.

This “meme”, this cinema graphic moment,  this notion that dead flesh could be enlivened by electricity was to become the most influential in all of science and, arguably, history.

This is merely the quest for immortality rejiggered which, in one form or another, has characterised human culture for all of recorded history and even before.  While the mummies of ancient Egypt are the most famous examples, we know of smoked preserved mummies in pre-historical Vietnam 14,000 years old, bodies dried out and smoked over fires then buried in the eternal hope that the gods will reanimate them.

The alternate name of Mary Shelley’s version of the tale is The modern Prometheus because the Titian Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving fire to the people.  Bound on a rock, an eagle tore out his liver each day and each day it grew back. The idea is that Viktor Frankenstein was committing sins comparable to that of Prometheus by creating life, the preserve of the gods. He suffers terrible punishment for this in the novel.

In the original novel written in 1818 by the wife of a famous poet Percy Shelly, who drowned off Genoa, the origin or the monster is completely different.  In that work Shelly does not make it clear how Victor Frankenstein makes the monster. She implies that it achieved by some obscure chemical process.

 This is understandable because the idea that living tissue responded to electrical activity had been discovered by Luigi Galvani only a few years before. It was he that stimulated frog legs with electrical shocks.

So, beginning from the 1931 film, the relationship between electricity and human tissue was implanted in our collective unconscious and was to lead eventually by a circuitous path to the misconception that brains are some form of computer working the way that they do, energised by some form of electrical energy.

Worse than this, it was also to lead to the idea that computers would eventually be developed that could not only function like our brains but be conscious like us.

 It is as though the hideous monster that Frankenstein developed could be perfected either as a robot or an intelligent restored zombie.

Also, deceased human beings frozen in liquid nitrogen could be brought to life again by future generations of scientists, which is largely the same endeavour of Frankenstein, as out lined in the novel.

As a collective group, we human beings have been unable to free ourselves es from the notion that the monster that Frankenstein made was merely a prototype of what could be achieved.

We fail to accept that putting consciousness into a computer, essentially a bunch of electrical stuff in a box, is as absurd as reanimating a frozen corpse or making a monster from sewn up human parts. Yet a vast array of supposedly intelligent people hold both these notions in their heads believing them possible.

One famous individual so be infected by the “Frankenstein meme” is Peter Thiel, a billionaire gay conservative supporter of the Trump presidency.  Besides donating millions to research to reverse ageing, he has also arranged to have his body cryogenically frozen to be revived at a later date.

We assume he must be an intelligent person who is wholly ignorant of medical science because, at one point, he championed the idea of injecting the blood of children into his body to prolong his life.

 The problem with reviving cryogenically frozen bodies is that it is impossible and a basic understanding of science would inform Theil of this.

This approach to prolonging life is reminiscent of the struggle of the Russian Federation to keep the body of Lenin preserved.

When the Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin died, a super-human effort was put into embalming and preserving his corpse. The embalmers faced a major setback at the beginning in that it is traditional in the process to inject formaldehyde or some other preservative solution in to the veins. This was not done with Lenin because the idea of preserving his corpse came somewhat after his death.

As time has passed Lenin’s body has come to look like a yellow card board cut out of him.With cryogenic preservation, Peter Thiel is planning the scientific equivalent of mummification.  

The idea is that at the moment of death the body is snap frozen with liquid nitrogen. It is then preserved, at great expense, in large metal chambers, much as one would imagine the bodies of astronauts travelling to distant planets would be kept in.

In Mary Shelly’s book, Frankenstein and his strange assistant steal body parts from houses of the poor, graves and medical laboratories. Shelly would not have supposed that these parts would be so hopelessly decayed post mortem that they were beyond redemption. Cryofreezing seeks to avoid this.

 In Peter Theil’s case he seems not to be aware that snap freezing his body in liquid nitrogen would not be much of an advance on what was done to Lenin because, as the body becomes more and more frozen, the water and the tissue freeze at different rates and eventually the tiny mitochondria and other organelles that comprise cells would rupture and break apart.

As the body would be likely kept for a long time these delicate structures would break down further despite the extreme low temperature and as the body was restored again to room temperature, when presumably some future science would want to awaken it, that process would merely accelerate the breakdown of these cellular structures further, meaning that, once revived, Peter Theil’s corpse would be little improvement on that of Lenin’s or Frankenstein’s for that matter.  

Also it seems the Thiel has not thought the process through. Does he imagine that his feelings and memories somehow survive the freezing process? Why would some future civilization want to awaken a long dead tech billionaire whose financial resources would long since have vanished?

The brain of course would be most susceptible to damage.

They may not know it but those in a quest for consciousness in computers or for a form of AI so excellent we cannot tell if comes from a person or a computer, are on the same fruitless journey. This “consciousness” it is supposed, would reside in humanoid robots.

Such creatures, like the Frankenstein monster, live only in the realm of fantasy as anyone who has interacted with clumsy humanoid robots that cannot fold a T-shirt, made so far, can attest. A Guardian article of 2024 by Victoria Turk summarises this well.

The quest for consciousness and artificial intelligence begins with Alan Turing. Turing made a major contribution to the second World War effort by decoding the German naval code, Enigma. As a reward for this the British Government charged him with homosexuality and chemically castrated him leading to his suicide.

 Turing evolved the notion, The Turing Test, also called the Imitation Test which essentially means that computers have achieved true intelligence which cannot be distinguished from that of a human being when the test is passed.

Turing evolved this test in 1950 well before the age of desktop computer

The way it would work is that the person carrying out the test would be concealed in one room and a computer in another and in a third, a real person.

The examiner asks questions and notes responses from the other rooms. The test is passed if the examiner is unable to tell which one of the responders in the other rooms are human and which not.

Andrew Zhou in Passing the Turing Test 2025 from the Classic Journal believes that computers can pass the test if they can “imitate thinking.” They don’t have to be intelligent to do this.

 For example if I asked the computer what the height of Mt. Everest is, it might say that it doesn’t know. Most people would say that. So the computer does not have to be knowledgeable or highly intelligent it just has to understand and answer the question just as an intelligent person might do.

Turing is not saying that the computer has to be conscious or be very intelligent, it just as to respond like any human being.

However the computer is not sitting on a desk thinking about stuff with thoughts going around in its “mind”. It is just imitating responses. When not being asked, it is doing nothing.

No computer is conscious. To be conscious we have to have the senses, smell, vision, hearing etc. Frankenstein’s monster is conscious and responds accordingly but he is a product of the imagination.

It is worth noting that that he is also evil and destroys his master and his master’s family. There are some who imagine that machines utilising AI will eventually see us as redundant and destroy us. This is part of the Frankenstein Delusion.

 They will destroy us not by plotting against us but because we will become so reliant on them that the systems maintained by machines will fall apart.

The best recent example of this is the dependence that financial institutions had on computer algorithms  that predicted whether loan applicants in the USA could take out a housing loan. The default on these loans by borrowers whose resources were over-inflated, nearly triggered  a collapse in the world financial system.

Over-reliance on telecommunication systems leads to serious failures in vital telephone services. In a recent example people died who could not access emergency care.  AI neither prevented or predicted this disaster which could have killed many more people. Indeed days passed before those tasked to run the telecommunication company even knew their systems had broken down.

 The over-hyped and unrealistic predictions of what Ai is capable of is part of the Frankenstein Delusion.

 Now we have Dish brain and Neuralink.

The rationale for the former is that scientists should be able to use brain cells like a computer chips, calculating with brain cells rather than chips. Brain cells in a Petrie dish are connected to banks of silicon chips which receive electrical impulses from them.

Brain cells generate energy and this is the basis of the electroencephalogram a device which collects the electrical impulses of the brain as a whole inscribing lines on a paper using electrical pens.

Epileptic loci can be detected in regions where the inscribing pens generate large coarse wave forms.  This test is used to diagnose epilepsy but despite it being around for over 100 years almost no other use has been found for it.

With dish brain the idea is to treat brain cells like components of a computer eventually connect them up to a functioning though primitive hard drive.

Nothing much has come out of the research other than the cells playing the game Pong. Here little points of light are batted around a computer screen as though on an electrical ping pong table. The researchers admit that their brain-in-a-dish is a poor player

The other major development utilising living cells is project Neuralink, a vanity project financed by the billionaire Elon Musk.

Here disabled paralysed people have computer chips implanted in their brains. These then collect electronic data from the brain and use a computer screen cursor to move in order to activate mobility aids.  The computer is not able to move limbs or mobilise the person as one would imagine with prosthetic limbs.

Though the disabled subjects were initially enthusiastic and saw benefits, these quickly faded. Part of the problem is that the body rejects the chips and attacks them with fibrous tissue. There is no way to overcome this problem or to turn off the body’s immune system.

What appeared to be a “brilliant” idea was flawed from the start and simply ignited false hopes in disabled people.

So Mary Shelly’s imaginings have tapped into the most persistent delusion perhaps in all of history which, at the beginning, took the form of religious mummification, the preserving of bodies in the hope that in some deified future they might live again.

In the modern world as a result of the scientific revolution we dreamed that we could make creatures as intelligent as us, putting our intelligence into them creating a world where every problem could be resolved by machine intelligence and all of our work could be done by intelligent robots.

This is a delusion.