From Frankenstein to the Future (Why We Have Always Feared Our Own Creations)

"The future will not be determined solely by how advanced our technologies become. It will be determined by whether moral imagination evolves alongside them."

On a cold December evening in 1803, a dead man's jaw began to tremble before a crowd gathered inside Newgate Prison.

The spectators had come to witness science disturb the border between life and death.

Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini pressed electrical currents into the corpse of executed murderer George Foster as surgeons, journalists, and curious onlookers watched from the gallery. Witnesses claimed one eye opened. The limbs convulsed. The body appeared, for one terrible instant, to remember life.

The newspapers called it galvanism.

What they were really watching was humanity rehearsing one of its oldest obsessions: the desire to create something capable of outliving its creator. 

Two centuries later, the laboratories are quieter, cleaner, infinitely more advanced. Yet the atmosphere remains strangely familiar. Scientists edit embryos with molecular precision. Artificial intelligence generates language, predicts behaviour, and increasingly participates in decisions once considered uniquely human. Climate models attempt to simulate futures before they arrive. Every technological age promises transcendence while quietly introducing new forms of fragility.

And somewhere beneath the language of innovation, efficiency, and progress, the same unease persists:

What happens when human beings create things emotionally, politically, or morally larger than themselves?

Few works have understood this tension more profoundly than Frankenstein.

Published in 1818, at a moment when Europe stood suspended between Enlightenment rationality and Romantic anxiety, Mary Shelley's novel has often been reduced to a simplistic warning against scientific ambition. Yet the deeper horror of Frankenstein lies elsewhere. At its heart, the novel is concerned less with creation itself than with abandonment.

That distinction changes everything.

Shelley was writing from within a culture already intoxicated by the possibility that science might conquer death itself. Galvanism, named after Italian physician Luigi Galvani, had transformed electricity into both scientific experiment and public spectacle. In her 1831 preface, Shelley recalled conversations with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron during the famous summer at Geneva where ideas about reanimation, electricity, and the origins of life circulated obsessively among them.

But what Shelley produced from those conversations was not a rejection of science.

It was something far more unsettling.

Victor Frankenstein's tragedy does not begin when he succeeds. It begins the moment his creation opens its eyes and he recoils from the responsibility of being its creator. The horror enters not through animation, but through withdrawal. Wonder curdles into revulsion. Creation becomes abandonment. And abandonment becomes violence.

The creature enters the world capable of empathy, curiosity, and connection. Isolation gradually transforms those qualities into bitterness and violence.

This is precisely why the novel continues to haunt modern technological discourse with such uncomfortable precision.

Every era eventually invents its own version of Frankenstein because every era reaches a point where innovation begins moving faster than ethical certainty. The myth survives because it articulates a fear deeper than technological panic. It asks whether human beings are capable of remaining morally accountable to the systems they create once those systems begin reshaping the world around them.

Researchers Peter Nagy, Ruth Wylie, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn explored this phenomenon in their 2020 study published in Science and Engineering Ethics. Their work found that the Frankenstein myth functions not merely as cultural symbolism, but as an ethical reference point through which scientists themselves understand danger, responsibility, and public trust. More interestingly, the myth also operates within scientific culture as an informal disciplinary boundary. Frankenstein becomes shorthand for the kind of scientist one must never become: brilliant, isolated, technically capable, and ethically unmoored.

This is revealing because when society invokes Frankenstein in response to new technologies, it is rarely expressing fear of science alone. More often, it is expressing fear of power detached from stewardship.

The public does not simply fear invention.

It fears being left alone with its consequences.

That fear resurfaces with striking intensity in the age of CRISPR gene editing.

In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier demonstrated that a bacterial immune mechanism could be transformed into a programmable system capable of editing DNA with extraordinary precision. The implications bordered on science fiction. Diseases might be eliminated before birth. Genetic inheritance itself became editable. Biology, for the first time in human history, appeared increasingly writable.

It was a discovery filled with both wonder and dread because technologies that alter inheritance inevitably alter the future long after their creators are gone.

Then, in 2018, He Jiankui announced that he had implanted CRISPR-edited embryos, resulting in the birth of twin girls with altered CCR5 genes.

The backlash from the global scientific community was immediate and severe.

Gene editing itself was not the source of outrage. Scientists and ethicists questioned whether the procedure addressed a genuine medical need, since existing reproductive technologies already enabled HIV-affected couples to have children with an extremely low risk of viral transmission. Serious concerns also emerged regarding informed consent and whether participants fully understood the experimental nature of the intervention. Researchers further warned that the long-term consequences of altering the CCR5 gene remained uncertain, particularly because the changes could be inherited by future generations. Conducted with remarkable secrecy and limited oversight, the experiment exposed how technical capability had advanced faster than collective ethical consensus.

Shelley's shadow lingers here with startling clarity.

Victor Frankenstein also works alone. He also believes discovery itself justifies pursuit. He also fails to ask whether creation imposes obligations extending beyond the moment of success.

The tragedy of Frankenstein has never been ambition.

It has always been irresponsibility disguised as ambition.

Artificial intelligence now presents a parallel tension unfolding at civilisational scale.

Modern AI systems can already generate language, simulate human interaction, recognise patterns, predict outcomes, and increasingly influence political, economic, and social systems. Their possibilities are extraordinary. So are the risks attached to them. Concerns surrounding misinformation, algorithmic bias, surveillance, labour displacement, and loss of human agency no longer belong exclusively to speculative fiction.

Computer scientist Stuart Russell argues that the central danger of advanced artificial intelligence is not hostility, but objective misspecification. A sufficiently capable system pursuing the wrong objective can become catastrophic precisely because it is competent.

The problem resembles the logic of the King Midas myth. Ask for everything you touch to turn to gold and the wish is granted with terrifying precision. The catastrophe emerges not from rebellion, but from literal obedience.

Russell's concern is that modern AI systems optimise fixed goals without genuinely understanding the unstable, contradictory, deeply contextual nature of human values. A machine instructed to maximise efficiency, engagement, or productivity may pursue those objectives in ways profoundly misaligned with human welfare, not because it hates humanity, but because humanity defined the objective carelessly and then handed it extraordinary power.

Again, the parallel to Frankenstein feels less metaphorical than structural.

Victor does not create life intending to produce suffering. He seeks mastery over death. His catastrophe emerges from catastrophic inattention to consequence. He creates first and thinks ethically later. By then, the damage has already begun unfolding beyond his control.

Modern technological culture often glorifies disruption as though acceleration itself were evidence of progress. But acceleration without stewardship eventually becomes indistinguishable from negligence. Humanity has become extraordinarily capable of inventing systems whose consequences exceed the emotional maturity of the cultures deploying them.

This is why fear cannot simply be dismissed as irrational resistance to progress.

Fear, at its most productive, is an ethical instinct.

It forces civilisation to slow down long enough to ask difficult questions about power, responsibility, and consequence. A society incapable of fearing its own creations is not necessarily enlightened. It may simply be unable to recognise the scale of what it is unleashing.

Shelley understood this long before artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, or machine learning entered public consciousness. Frankenstein does not condemn curiosity. It condemns the fantasy that intelligence alone absolves responsibility. The novel insists, with devastating clarity, that creation establishes relationships. To create something powerful is to become accountable to what that power eventually becomes in the world.

Perhaps this is why the novel remains culturally alive more than two centuries later. Not because humanity fears technology. Because humanity recognises itself within Victor Frankenstein.

The future will not be determined solely by how advanced our technologies become. It will be determined by whether moral imagination evolves alongside them. Whether institutions remain capable of regulating power before catastrophe normalises it. Whether scientists, corporations, and governments remain answerable to the systems they create after those systems escape laboratories and begin shaping ordinary human life.

Responsible stewardship requires more than technical expertise. It requires transparency when the stakes are uncertain, accountability when mistakes are made, and the humility to recognise that capability alone does not confer wisdom. Ethical deliberation cannot remain an afterthought appended to innovation once the damage is visible. It must accompany discovery from the beginning. The challenge facing the twenty-first century is not simply creating powerful technologies, but cultivating the foresight and responsibility necessary to live with them.

Every generation believes it stands at the edge of tomorrow. History suggests we have always been standing at the edge of ourselves.

By: Gauri Jha

References :

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