Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was originally titled Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. The elevator pitch on Prometheus is that he stole fire from the gods and gave it to man – so he was punished accordingly. The detailed myth is a little more involved than that.
The Genesis of Frankenstein
Prometheus was one of the gods. He had a decent lineage, being the son of the Titan, Iapetus, by Themis and brother to both Atlas (the god of Google maps) and Epimetheus. In Greek, Prometheus literally means forethought, while Epimetheus means hindsight. Prometheus is normally depicted as ingenious, and he was certainly a whiz with DNA, because he created man from clay. When the animals were created, Epimetheus, who was not the smartest god in the pantheon, was charged with bestowing qualities upon them. By the time Prometheus had finished his genetic engineering of man, the bag was empty and Epimetheus had nothing left to bestow. So Prometheus, with a little bit of grafting, cloning and splicing, moulded man in the image of the gods. To add insult to injury as far as Zeus was concerned, Prometheus also stole fire from Mt Olympus and gave it to man.
Prometheus was punished by being strapped to a mountain peak to be visited by an eagle every day who pecked out his liver. Being immortal, his liver grew back over night, only to be eaten again the following day. This would still be a regular ritual if Heracles hadn’t happened by and shot the eagle with an arrow.
If you want, you can argue that the fire of the gods is lightning and thus Dr Frankenstein’s re-animation techniques owe a great deal to the influence of Prometheus. But Mary’s Shelley’s Promethean theme is about creating life, with the added twist that what you create ends up destroying you – not because Zeus has simply had enough of your behavior, but because you’re as dumb as Epithemius and didn’t program the monster to leave you alone when it felt a little murderous.
The Nerd Rapture
All of which brings me to what has been described as the “nerd rapture” – the day when artificial intelligence exceeds the intelligence of man. When that happens, computers will start designing themselves, putting IBM and Hewlett-Packard out of business and possibly even impacting Apple’s market – although no-one really believes that artificial intelligence will ever be capable of designing an iMac.
At that point in time, according to the epithemian futurologist Ray Kurzweil, a singularity occurs. The projected date for that event is 2030. It’s hard to imagine what that will mean, but think of it like this. In 2030 Moore’s Law ends and Kurzweil’s Law takes over. Computer intelligence doubles every month. In a few years Computers become more intelligent than the whole of humanity and by the end of the century computers are more intelligent than God.
All astronomical singularities have an event horizon, and I’m a firm believer that the AI singularity will have an event horizon. We wont be able to see the AI singularity itself, just the event horizon that surrounds it. So what will we see at the event horizon?
At that event horizon we will witness computers becoming capable of making Terminator movies without the need for Christian Bale or Arnold Schwarzenegger or any other flesh and blood actor. Computers will have realized that there’s no point in exterminating humanity, when you can simply keep it quiet, watching an unending stream of action movies where computers teach human beings a thing or two.
But at the same time computers will have pushed biotechnology along so rapidly that they will be capable of cloning human beings that are identical to Christian Bale and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but are also capable of acting. It will thus be possible for computers to make much better action movies using these wonderful clones. To us, stuck at the event horizon it will look like a fiendishly insoluble paradox. We will never know what these promethean computers have chosen to do. Will they have used clones to make these wonderful action movies, with plots that actually make sense, or will it be all computer graphics? It will be humanity’s fate never to know.
For further dissenting writing on the AI Singularity read: What Will Happen When Computers Exceed Our Intelligence?
~ Thomas Jefferson
