Director Guillermo del Toro’s new movie adapts Mary Shelley’s horror classic, Frankenstein. It comes as the world is grappling with a new unpredictable creation: artificial intelligence.

Guests

Scott Collura, writer and editor for IGN.com.

Eileen Hunt, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Author of the book Artificial Life After Frankenstein.

Christopher DiCarlo, philosopher, educator and ethicist. Senior researcher at Convergence Analysis. Author of the book Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.

Also Featured

Erik Brynjolfsson, Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Transcript

Part I

It’s Alive! It’s Alive! (CLIP)

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Frankenstein never stops being relevant. That clip, of course, is from the classic 1931 film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s immortal novel with Colin Clive as the mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein. Boris Karloff as his hulking monster. Now, director Guillermo del Toro has released his take on Frankenstein, and it comes as our world is grappling with a new, unpredictable creation.

GUILLERMO del TORO: My concern is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity. I think that’s what drives most of the world’s worst features. But I did want it to have the arrogance of Victor be similar in some ways to the tech bros. He’s blind creating something without considering the consequences.

CHAKRABARTI: del Toro spoke about the movie with NPR’s Fresh Air earlier this month.

del TORO: If you have to teach an AI to think in ones and zeros, oh my God, I would love for a generation to get raising kids, right? One time, one time. In the entire history of mankind, there hasn’t been a single generation that was raised right all across the globe.

And I think that’s our biggest failure in a way. Ones and zeroes don’t get the alchemy that you get with emotion and experience. You get the information. But you don’t get the alchemy of emotion, spirituality, and feeling.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, as AI looms larger in our real everyday lives and AI companies push toward their stated goal of artificial super intelligence, what can Victor Frankenstein and his creature show us about humanity, hubris and technology?

What was Mary Shelley trying to teach us when she wrote her original story back in 1818? That’s what we’re gonna look at today, and we will start with Del Toro’s new movie. And joining us now is Scott Collura. He’s a writer and editor for IGN.com, where he covers pop culture. Scott, welcome to On Point.

SCOTT COLLURA: Oh, happy Halloween.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s almost as if we planned it that way.(LAUGHS) So I first wanna just get a little bit of sound from the movie. It is from top to bottom, a unmistakable Guillermo del Toro film, right? It’s lavish in its ability to really find beauty in even the most monstrous. So here’s a little clip from the trailer.

(TRAILER PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Honestly just gives me shivers listening to that little clip here. Scott, tell us a little bit about the backstory of del Toro and his … lifelong almost desire to make a Frankenstein film.

COLLURA: Oh yeah, for sure. He’s been trying to make this movie for at least 20 years. I remember interviewing him when my son was about two years old.

And we talked about it then. My son is now a senior in high school, so that gives you a little bit of a sense of how long this has been going on. But he has said that he became fascinated by the character when he was about seven years old. I think he happened to catch the James Whale film, the Boris Karloff film, and he was just taken in by it and it spoke to him in a way that I believe he said that even his religion, Catholicism was not able to, and it became his religion. So it’s been his mission ever since then, I think, to make this movie.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, isn’t that interesting? Okay. So it’s a fairly, by the way, I’m going to try and limit spoilers, folks, so if I ask a question that might lead to a spoiler, I will give you a heads up here, because the film right now is in limited release in theaters, but everyone gets access to it on November 7th on Netflix.

But Scott, just your first take on what are the del Toro hallmarks for how he has interpreted Frankenstein?

COLLURA: Yes. As you said, it very much is a Del Toro movie. Just in terms of the visuals. It is this sweeping sort of grand, beautiful yet horrific depiction of humanity.

And he’s not really making a horror film here. Outwardly you think Frankenstein is a horror story and yes, it’s got some gore, and it’s got creepy moments, but it’s really more told in the gothic style of storytelling. It’s much more similar to his film, Crimson Peak, which he made about 10 years ago.

Which, you know, huge castles, beautiful costuming in front of those darker imagery. And so that’s what he’s going for here. And he has said that the James Whale film and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein are among his favorite films of all time. But his creature is a lot different from the traditional Karloff creature that we think of.

The lumbering sort of monster. This creature is played by Jacob Elordi. He’s very smooth in his movements. He’s almost like a ballet player in some way, ballet dancer in some ways. And he’s really, this is del Toro’s version of Frankenstein. Without a doubt.

CHAKRABARTI: I feel like there also must be some kind of unwritten rule that you can’t have Jacob Elordi play a character that’s not hot in some way. (LAUGHS)

COLLURA: Oh yeah. He’s the most beautiful monster ever. (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so the next question I’m gonna ask might be, like, just a tiny spoiler in terms of a little bit of a change that del Toro made from their original novel. So for people who don’t want to hear this, just stick your fingers in your ear and go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But Scott, there is a kind of new character, which if memory serves, does not appear anywhere in Mary Shelley’s classic, and that is someone who funds and encourages Victor Frankenstein.

COLLURA: Yes, for sure. This is Christophe Waltz’s character, is named Hendrich Harlander. And yeah, he’s a del Toro creation.

He is essentially a venture capitalist, I guess. He funds Victor Frankenstein’s experiments, but he doesn’t necessarily have the best reasons for doing this. He’s a war profiteer. He is a money guy, and he really has selfish reasons. He wants the key to our immortality is what it comes down to.

In terms of looking at this from a modern perspective, it’s not unlike a lot of the things we see happening in our world where people are maybe not always doing things for the right reasons. They’re pursuing selfish goals without considering where it’s all going to bring us.

CHAKRABARTI: So he basically amplifies Frankenstein’s already considerable a ambition.

Tell us about del Toro’s Victor Frankenstein.

COLLURA: Yeah, so Victor Frankenstein is played by Oscar Isaac, and it’s interesting because he really comes across as the villain in a lot of ways throughout the movie. I don’t want to give too much away. Yeah. But he’s, again, Jacob Elordi’s creature is very different.

And even though the creatures traditionally can be portrayed sympathetically, very often is just regarded as a monster. But Victor here, he just does not give any consideration to what this is all going to add up to. And the story is very much one of generational trauma. We get a backstory about Victor’s dad, who is an abusive father, and Victor carries that abuse onto his child, who is the creature, basically.

And so you can see that Del Toro, he’s inserting his own aspects to this story while still managing to be pretty faithful to the Mary Shelley book as well.

CHAKRABARTI: And this is one aspect or a theme that runs through a lot of Guillermo Del Toro’s work, right? Sort of intergenerational trauma.

And I feel like it’s one of the reasons why he has been, for his whole life, just attracted to finding that the true evil doesn’t necessarily lie in monsters. My favorite del Toro film under that theme is Pan’s Labyrinth, which I still think is just a masterful parable of pain and trauma and childhood.

Set in the Spanish Civil War, Scott?

COLLURA: Yes. Yes. That is a beautiful film. It is amazing. It’s a story of a little girl who Yeah, it’s during the Spanish Civil War and the horrors she’s seeing happening around her and she’s escaping into a fairytale land to try to find some solace. del Toro, his monsters usually aren’t monsters. That’s the thing. He won the Oscar for the Shape of Water, which is about a woman who falls in love with a sea creature. He finds the humanity in these things. And in terms of him putting a sort of modern spin on this story.

This is something that the good Frankenstein movies have always been able to do. To go back to the James Whale film, James the director of the Karloff film, he was a World War I veteran. And a lot of people look at that movie as him kind of parsing what he saw during the war, the World War I, of course, the beginning of mechanized warfare and scientists and engineers creating these weapons without considering what they really were going to do to the population. That’s one way to look at the 1931 Frankenstein.

And so now del Toro is doing it as well with this, obviously we’re talking about AI today, but it’s very fair to read this movie in that way.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons why Shelley’s novel, it seems like it will never go out of fashion. Because human hubris doesn’t go out of fashion.

Oh. So I just want to play another quick clip from the trailer since you did mention why and how people create things that they can’t control. So here’s another clip from del Toro’s new movie Frankenstein.

(CLIP PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: From the trailer of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Scott, we just have a minute before we got to take a break here. Overall, was it an enjoyable, I really loved watching the film. But you’re a del Toro fan, how do you think it fits within the pantheon of his own work?

COLLURA: Oh, I think it’s one of his best films for sure. I think, as I said earlier, it’s not necessarily a straight up monster movie as much as it’s more of a Crimson Peak style, gothic story, but I just think he has just continued to hone his craft over the years and certainly Netflix gave him some money here.

To put this vision on the screen as well. I think it’s terrific. And, as a Frankenstein fan, I was really, I might be a tough customer. I’ve seen a lot of Frankenstein movies. It did not disappoint. And as a del Toro fan, loved it as well.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: I’d like to bring Eileen Hunt into the conversation.

She’s a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, an author of the book, Artificial Life After Frankenstein, and she joins us from Notre Dame in Indiana. Professor Hunt, welcome to On Point.

EILEEN HUNT: Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m delighted to have you. I wanna just replay a clip that we had at the top of the show of del Toro himself explaining some of the themes or concerns that he had that he tried to imbue into the movie.

And here it is.

del TORO: My concern is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity. I think that’s what drives most of the world’s worst features. But I did want it to have the arrogance of Victor be similar in some ways to the tech bros. He’s blind creating something without considering the consequences.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Hunt, I would just love to hear your response to that.

HUNT: del Toro is one of our most important scholars of Frankenstein in the 21st century. He knows the novel very well. He knows the scholarship on the novel very well. He said that the work of the great romanticist Anne K. Mellor on Shelley has been his Bible in developing this Frankenstein project over many decades now.

In this quote he quite cleverly reverses the concept of artificial intelligence into natural stupidity. And claims that natural stupidity is the real problem. I would tweak that a bit. I would say that in Mary Shelley’s novel, she’s not so much concerned with natural stupidity as in stupidity that grows out of nature itself.

Stupidity that would be somehow essential to the human condition. She’s rather concerned with the artifice of both intelligence and stupidity. And in particular, the artifice of moral stupidity, doing the wrong thing when we have the ability to use our minds to do the right thing.

CHAKRABARTI: Aha. Okay. So let’s spend just a couple minutes relearning the story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and even the how and why she wrote it.

I will never stop being amazed that she was, what, 19, professor, when she wrote Frankenstein.

HUNT: Yes. She was 19 when she wrote it. She was 20 when it came out. Yeah, she began it in June of 1816 on a trip to Geneva where she and her then lover, Percy Shelley were visiting their new friend, Lord Byron, at his palatial lakeside mansion, the Villa Diodati, and it was raining so much that summer because it was known as the year without a summer. As a result of this volcanic eruption that had taken place in Indonesia the previous year.

They didn’t know that, but as a result of this volcanic eruption there was basically nonstop rain and even snow in Europe in the summer of 1816. They were forced to spend most of their time indoors, hiding from the rain, and they decided to have a ghost story competition.

And out of that competition came the novel of Frankenstein.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this hour is going to be replete with some of the most remarkable names from literary history, right? You just dropped Lord Byron on us. Obviously, Shelley, and we should mention that Mary Shelley was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as well.

What else was going on in her life at the time? Because I’ve read some recent-ish scholarship that says that she had lost a child.

HUNT: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So she ran away with Percy Shelley, who was a married man when she was just 16 years old, and very soon after their elopement to Europe she became pregnant and she had a baby two months premature, who died then two weeks later in March of 1815. That baby, we think, was so young, they may not have formally named her. And the loss of that child haunted her. She literally had dreams and nightmares about trying to revive the child through the warmth of her own hands and the warmth of Percy’s hands.

So this haunting image of trying to revive the dead baby is one that Frankenstein scholars from Ellen Moers to Anne K. Mellor have emphasized is at the root of the nightmare that gives birth to the novel of Frankenstein. Where the central protagonist, Victor Frankenstein tries to animate a body made from the parts of human and other animal corpses through the enlightenment science of technology and the enlightenment science of chemistry.

And he does this in the wake of the death of his own mother. And it’s the death of his own mother that triggers this hubristic and Promethean attempt on his part to create life.

Interestingly, without a mother. To create life as a man through science and technology, without a mother. And many feminist scholars have pointed out that this attempt to create life without a mother is fundamentally tyrannical in the sense that it deprives the resulting child of a mother.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. By the way you said Promethean, and we should note that the full title of the novel is Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, which is quite important.

But what was interesting is that right now, like we remember Victor Frankenstein as someone who’s driven by, as you said, this hubris, but to be reminded that in the novel the hubris was, it was amplified by loss. By the loss of his mother and then him seeking to channel the anguish and love in some direction.

That gives him a different shade than we may popularly believe. Like how would you characterize who Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is?

HUNT: That’s a great question. It’s been emphasized that Victor Frankenstein has many parallels to her eventual husband Percy Shelley. But it’s also interesting to think about the ways in which Mary Shelley infused aspects of herself in Victor Frankenstein, that Victor Frankenstein was never a wholly evil character, and just as he was never a wholly stupid character.

He is a very human character. He is driven by grief to try to create life in the same way his mother gave him life. This fails spectacularly. And yet it’s a very human emotion that drives his quest to make the creature. He initially wants to make the creature perfect and a human being even.

But when he animates the creature, he is horrified by what he has produced. And he runs in fear from it. That’s also a very human emotion, and as many scholars have pointed out, Mary Shelley herself felt quite numb when she found that firstborn daughter dead in her crib. She simply wrote in her journal, find my baby dead.

And so Victor Frankenstein in many ways embodies that numbness, that emotional numbness that Mary Shelley herself felt when she was bereft of her firstborn child. And it is that numbness that, of course, leads Victor Frankenstein to flee his responsibility for making this creature. And in the clip you played earlier from the film, Jacob Elordi does a great job bringing this ethical situation to life when he reminds his maker, I’m not a something, I’m a someone.

Victor Frankenstein in many ways embodies that numbness, that emotional numbness that Mary Shelley herself felt when she was bereft of her firstborn child.

Eileen Hunt

And this is exactly what Mary Shelley dramatizes in the core of the novel, the heart of this novel is the creature confronting his maker on the Mer de Glace amidst the glaciers of the Alps. And there, he forces his maker to sit down and finally hear his story of grief and abandonment as a result of being left behind by his maker.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me ask you this, because we can’t know for sure what exact lessons Shelley wanted us as readers to read. We can only know how we as readers interpret it, but if memory serves, and Professor Hunt, correct me if I’m wrong, but Frankenstein’s monster also ends up, he asks for something that Victor Frankenstein either cannot give or refuses to give.

And I ask this because there’s an element of things that we create will somehow slip our control.

HUNT: Absolutely. And this is where Mary Shelley’s novel is incredibly prescient for our contemporary debates on AI ethics, our responsibility for making thinking beings or things that may quickly outstrip us in intelligence.

So in the novel, Victor Frankenstein is asked by his creature to make him an equal female companion equal in every way, equal in ugliness, first and foremost, so that she will accept him for his monstrosity or apparent monstrosity in his visage. And at first, Victor Frankenstein agrees because he thinks he owes it to the creature.

He owes the creature this because otherwise the creature will be truly alone and will have no companionship, will have nothing. And it’s important to note that at this point in the novel, the creature has already committed his first and worst crime, which is the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s little brother William Frankenstein.

So even despite the fact that the creature has committed child murder, Victor Frankenstein agrees quite foolishly, or as del Toro would say, stupidly agrees. Out of a sort of guilt, he thinks, okay, I owe this to him. I’ve got to make him an equal female companion. So he goes off to Scotland eventually on this remote island to build this female companion.

And the creature follows him along the way to make sure he follows through on his promise, right? But at the very moment that he’s about to bring this half made female companion to life, Victor conducts this thought experiment in his head, which has now become a common thought experiment in the philosophy of AI.

And that thought experiment goes something like this. If I make this intelligent being to be a companion for this already operating super intelligence, what if they somehow reproduce? And what if they make a whole new species of intelligent creatures that are so smart and so maniacal that they attempt to destroy all of humanity and take over the world? And it’s exactly this thought experiment that philosophers such as Nick Bostrom of Oxford have made mainstream and AI ethics today.

This could be described as the super intelligence thought experiment. What if we have this explosion of artificial intelligence, at an exponential level, that leads to the proliferation of AI technology to the point we have no control over it anymore. And when Victor Frankenstein conducts this thought experiment, he decides to not just destroy the equal female companion, but to tear it to pieces in front of his own creature.

And is this tyrannical and murderous act of cruelty on the part of Victor, however well intentioned or well motivated, on behalf of the wellbeing of humanity that leads to the final series of tragedies in the novel. And again, I won’t give any spoilers for those who haven’t read the novel yet.

CHAKRABARTI: You can give spoilers for an 1818 novel, professor.

Let’s just put, it doesn’t end well for either of them.

HUNT: (LAUGHS) It doesn’t end well for anybody in the novel and if I understand del Toro’s film from reading about it, I’ve not yet had a chance to see it. He preserves the framing of Mary Shelley’s story. At the end of the novel, Victor Frankenstein and the Creature meet again this time in the Arctic.

And the creature by this point, has killed several more of Victor Frankenstein’s family, has effectively wiped out the entire Frankenstein clan. And he has not directly murdered his own maker, but his maker has died as a result of trying to pursue him into the Arctic.

And he finds his father’s dead body on a ship. Frozen in the ice. And he sits by his father’s dead body and weeps. And this is another moment of humanity on the part of the creature. So the tragedy of Mary Shelley’s novel, and I think this is why we can read it as a tragedy, is that at the end of the day, the creature, the artificially made super intelligence is as traumatized and as hurt as any of his victims.

At the end of the day, the creature, the artificially made super intelligence is as traumatized and as hurt as any of his victims.

Eileen Hunt

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Professor, if I can just jump in here for a second, forgive me. Because I think this is actually a great point in which to really more firmly ground it ground Frankenstein in our modern times.

And I just wanna note that professor Eileen Hunt is also author of the book, Artificial Life After Frankenstein. So let’s listen to one of, the modern age’s most powerful tech bros. This is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in June of 2025, and he thinks one of the benefits of artificial intelligence would be its ability to do even more scientific research.

If we had a system that was capable of either doing autonomous discovery of new science, or greatly increasing the capability of people using the tool to discover new science, that would feel like almost definitionally super intelligence to me and be a wonderful thing for the world, I think.

I want to bring Christopher DiCarlo into the conversation now. He is author of Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It, and he joins us from Toronto, Canada. Christopher DiCarlo, welcome back to On Point.

CHRISTOPHER DiCARLO: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Is AI a modern day Frankenstein’s monster?

DiCARLO: Perhaps, right? It could be. It depends on what we decide. Right now, we have a small window of opportunity to decide how we wish to proceed, and so there’s about five major tech bros in the world and they’re all racing to attain AGI. Artificial general intelligence. This is the brass ring and the holy grail of all business and defense.

In the history of humanity. It is the next level of computer technology, which would have basically systems thinking like humans and behaving like them only a thousand times better and more efficiently. What we in the AI risk mitigation business are worried about is that they’re not going to stop at AGI.

They’re going to allow this system to continue to improve upon itself, what’s known as recursive self-improvement. And if that happens, we’re very concerned that once it gets to a level of super intelligence, we don’t know what it’s going to think of us.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Hunt, let me ask you this. I’m particularly fascinated by the fact that Mary Shelley in the early 19th century would’ve been aware of two opposing forces. And one is you mentioned the enlightenment, that the enlightenment brought so many positive scientific advancements, so many positive philosophical advancements.

We were understanding the stars better than ever. We were applying as human beings the notion of human autonomy more elegantly than ever. So here’s a positive take on what science can achieve.

But then at the same time, she was living right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the UK, which the technology sped up the UK’s economic development, but it also came at a horrific cost for people who were basically ground down by the machines, metaphorically, of industrialization. So there’s a subtlety in what I presume is her own understanding of the good and the bad that human technology can bring.

HUNT: Absolutely. And in our own time, we see the development of what we now understand as computer science. In the 1820s and the 1830s, Charles Babbage started to develop his thinking machines. And by 1840, of course, Ada Lovelace has written a computer program for one of them to program a computer to perform music.

Interestingly, Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley’s friend who hosted her —

CHAKRABARTI: Mind blowing.

HUNT: At the Villa Diodati. And in Mary Shelley’s own time, we see the legacies of the enlightenment, especially in science, playing out all around her. In newspapers in the late 1820s and 1830s the biographer, Miranda Seymour found that Frankenstein was used as a metaphor to describe Charles Babbage’s hulking computers.

And so people were already making the connections. People were already seeing the potential of technology in general, but specifically, thinking technology or intelligent technology and how it could become a sort of hulking, walking, Frankenstein’s creature that might act monstrously if we don’t guide it properly.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let’s now, once again, return to our current time. With that in mind, this is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and he was on the Dwarkesh podcast back in April, and he talked about what he sees as the potential benefits of artificial super intelligence.

ZUCKERBERG: AI that can lead towards a world of abundance where like everyone has these superhuman tools to create whatever they want, and that leads to just dramatically empowering people and creating all these economic benefits.

Part of it is going to be solving things that we hold up as like these like hard problems, like solving diseases or just different technology that makes our lives better. But I would guess that a lot of it is going to end up being cultural and social pursuit and entertainment and I would guess that the world is going to get a lot more, a lot funnier.

CHAKRABARTI: Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Christopher DiCarlo. The reason why I wanted to play that is because as Professor Hunt said, in Mary Shelley’s time, it was inescapable to have to confront both the good and the bad of a quantum leap forward in human technology. Every time we bring up Frankenstein’s monster as an analogy, let’s think about the dawn of the nuclear age.

At least Oppenheimer was aware enough to have quoted the Bhagavad Gita and say he was also the destroyer of world. So that complexity, that inner complexity was there. I would argue that not for all five of these super powerful tech bros that you talked about, but for some of them, we have returned to an era of just unbridled un self-reflective optimism about what tech can do.

And is that not dangerous?

DiCARLO: Oh, extremely. It’s the metaphor is, we’re driving like Thelma and Louise towards the edge of the canyon, and the view just keeps getting better. So what they see are just the benefits. They’re not focusing on the potential for risks.

And back in the nineties, I was working on my dissertation, and I developed a model, an information theory that predicted what is happening today. And I went to various university presidents and said, we should build this big super brain to help solve the world’s problems. And they all thought it was a great idea, but I couldn’t get funding to create it.

But I knew at some point it would be built. And it was at that point that I drafted up like a universal accord for the future of humanity. If you’re going to build this thing, maybe these are the safeguards you want to have in place before, before you turn on that final switch.

CHAKRABARTI: And?

DiCARLO: They’re not listening. Dario and Daniela Amodei from Anthropic are the ones who seem to be the most moral in this race. They’re the ones who are very concerned about it. Even Elon said, we shouldn’t be doing this, but I’m going to join the race simply because they’re not going to stop.

But the fact of the matter is, when I wanted to build this machine, I didn’t want it to have access to the entire internet. I wanted it to be what’s called boxed to be contained so that nothing could get in and it couldn’t get out, so that we could be assured that we could control or at the very least, contain this thing if it got to a level of super intelligence.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Hunt. That makes me wonder though, that is one of the lessons that we could draw from Shelley’s novel, is she trying to tell us that no matter what we create or at least try to create, if we’re trying to create something that is more than us as human beings, that no matter, we will just simply not ever be able to contain it.

HUNT: Yeah, it’s an interesting debate in the scholarship on Frankenstein. There certainly is a school of thought that wants to read the novel as a sort of morality tale against science itself, against the escalation of our technological hubris, a sort of anti enlightenment, morality tale. I pushed back against that in my scholarship.

I think Mary Shelley was extremely well read in the history of science. She knew all the trends in enlightenment science. She went to visit scientists and view their demonstrations and lectures. All of this informs the story of Frankenstein itself. She was not anti-science. Far from it.

And if we read the novel carefully, we’ll see that she does not turn the creature absolutely into evil being, a purely evil being. Actually, following her mother’s theological views, I don’t think Mary Shelley believed that it was possible there could be a purely evil being in the world. Because that would mean God himself would be evil.

And instead, she makes her creature someone whose behavior is made monstrous, through just unthinkable neglect and abuse. And so that’s why I’ve read the novel more as a study of the dangers of child abuse.

And if we understand potential artificially intelligent beings as our children, as the French philosopher Latour once encouraged us to do, then we have an obligation towards those children, whether they are our organically produced children, or they are our technologically produced children, to give them the environment they need to grow and develop in a way that is humane.

And so I would agree that we are in a pivotal moment. We must seize the opportunity to abide by the advice of not only Mary Shelley, but also Alan Turing, who in his 1948 paper on intelligent machinery came up with the idea of training future intelligent machines as we raise and train children.

And he had this interesting concept of the child machine. Which he did not live to fully develop. But I think if he did, he might’ve done so in the vein of Mary Shelley.

CHAKRABARTI: So since you mentioned Turing, let me bring in this thought because we spoke to Erik Brynjolfsson, who’s a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and he told us he thinks there is a danger definitely that AI researchers will get caught in what he calls the Turing trap, which is of course named after Alan Turing’s famous test about whether a human being can tell that they’re talking to a machine or not.

CHAKRABARTI: And here is what Brynjolfsson told us.

BRYNJOLFSSON: This idea that if we try to make something that’s a perfect imitation of us, that can be very appealing and seductive, like Victor Frankenstein thought. We should really be looking to make as often as possible tools that help enhance us to do new things rather than simply imitate us. As an economist, one of the downsides of that is that it leads to a lot more concentration of wealth and power and it disempowers labor.

CHAKRABARTI: Christopher DiCarlo, do you have a response to that?

DiCARLO: Yes. It can, that’s one of the biggest fears, right? Is that there’s going to be a huge disruption and there’s going to be major job loss. And are politicians getting ready for this? Are they considering follow up systems, like potentially universal basic income? Because if there’s no jobs left for anybody to do what are we going to do and how are, how are we going to survive?

So yeah, that’s definitely a factor we have to consider. Now that I’ve got Professor Hunt on the line, I’d like to just pose something to her. Do you think with the romantic movement that was happening in the 19th century with literature, do you foresee something similar, like a neoromantic movement where people will push back against the AI technology?

Like it’ll be too much for them, like the industrial revolution?

HUNT: It depends on your interpretation of romantic because there are different trends in romanticism. Some trends in romanticism are taking that enlightenment worldview that put science and reason at its core, and then putting it in dialogue with the critique of industrialization and its ravaging of nature.

In the 19th century, I would put Mary Shelley in that in-between camp. That’s trying to fuse ideas of the enlightenment with ideas of romanticism not to understand romanticism as somehow the negation of the enlightenment. So I would argue that what we need actually is something in the spirit of what del Toro I think is doing in the film.

We need a revival of Mary Shelley-ian thought, honestly. We really do, because I think she had a kind of brutally realistic view of the potential dangers of scientific hubris and technological hubris in general gone wrong. And at the same time, she saw the potential for redemption in love itself and especially the parent-child bond.

And so she is at once both bleakly realistic about the dangers and the pitfalls, and also gives us hope that if we could just find a way to cherish and love our creations as we’re meant to cherish and love our own children we might find a way forward.

CHAKRABARTI: Christopher DiCarlo, we’ve only got a minute left.

A little bit more than a minute. With Professor Hunt’s last comment in mind, is part of the way forward also, I know that some of these oligarchs, as you’ve named them, have said don’t look to us for regulation. Don’t put us in charge of controlling what we’ve created, that’s on you, society.

But maybe part of what we need to do is to cherish and love what we have as human beings more, and have that be a fundamental thought in thinking about how to actually appropriately regulate especially generative AI.

DiCARLO: Oh yeah, for sure. But the problem is that you have that incentive to acquire more and more resources to get more and more money. And then of course, defense wants more and more power. And because this race is going on, instead of a Manhattan Project, it could turn into a Manhattan trap where nobody’s going to win. If we don’t have these guardrails in place that can control this type of technology before we get to that point.

CHAKRABARTI: Because you’ve said that AI has the very real likelihood of having an intelligence and power that we can’t even fathom.

DiCARLO: Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: In this case, that’s how it will slip our control. It will be able to do things we couldn’t imagine, just as Frankenstein’s monster asked him for something he never thought of.

This idea of being cared for and loved.

DiCARLO: Exactly. And for some who say we’ll just unplug it, if it gets outta control, we’ll just unplug it. So you go ahead and you unplug it and it’s still running because it’s already 20 steps ahead of us and it’s figured out an alternative energy source.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.