A Tale of Frankenstein – Lecture at Bard College

by
Robert Skidelsky
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19 November 2024

Introduction

As we all know  Frankenstein was the  scientist in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel of that name, who invented a human machine, which he intended   to be a benefactor,  but  which  turned out to be a monster. The question I want to address this evening is: can we avoid  our technology destroying us?  This is the most important thread running through my  book, Mindless, just published in the United States.  It discusses   the impact of machines on jobs, on freedom, on our survival as a species. The question which dominates all three concerns   the impact of machines on our humanness . Today we ponder whether there is still time to  control The Machine before it controls us.  I will talk about  three Frankensteins who wanted to  create gods and created monsters. Let me start with Mary Shelley.

I.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), marks the historical moment when the Enlightenment dream turns sour.    It tells the story of a hominoid creature, constructed from dead body parts and animated by a battery, to serve its idealistic master, the medical scientist Victor Frankenstein, who wants to create a more perfect human. But his creation turned on its creator  and became a killing machine.  Mary Shelley’s story of a science experiment gone wrong, became a metaphor for the whole project of mechanising human intelligence. It marks the start of the humanistic revolt against the machine, a warning against hubris,  which, alas, has not been heeded.

Mary’’s husband was the poet Percy Bryce Brysse Shelley; his  dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound, with its message  of the liberating power of science, was penned at exactly the same time as Mary wrote Frankenstein. Shelley’’s Prometheus is the ideal revolutionary: he  rebels in the name of humanity, impelled, its author says, ‘‘by the purest and truest motives to the best and noblest ends’’. Mary Shelley tells a very different story. Hr Modern Prometheus  reflects the  growing opposition of the Romantic poets to the horrors of the Industrial Revolution.

One can only wonder at the marital disharmony between the two Shelleys which must have resulted from two such contrasting views of the human future.  Let me also offer this thought:  Prometheus  is a peculiarly western  myth  – born in classical Greece,  taken over by  the Enlightenment.We don’t find its equivalent in other civilisations. This should influence the way we think about the future of science and technology. 

The novel’s  protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, is a medical doctor, skilled in the surgery of dissection, who seeks to learn how to create life from inanimate matter.  In conceiving him, Mary Shelley drew both on the traditional literature of animated puppets and automated robots, and on the new materialist science in which consciousness is a by-product of matter. The science of her  Modern Prometheus  reflects the debates on galvanism (the use of electricity to stimulate or restart life) then taking place. 

 We must keep this aspect- the dream  of creating conscious life from inanimate matter – in mind, because it stlll  inspires the effort to create a modern  Prometheus. But Frankenstein’s  Creature never attains the godhood promised by Enlightenment science, turning instead into a Monster.  The novel thus has the double character of Gothic horror story, and of science gone horribly wrong.

Early on, Victor Frankenstein is motivated in his scientific endeavours by a mixture of ambition and humanitarianism: ‘“what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!’”  All Frankensteins combine  a genuine Benevolence  with the quest for Power and Glory.  As  the novel progresses Power takes control. Frankenstein  becomes possessed by a demonic hunger for power over nature: “‘with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places…..A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.” .’

There has been much debate about why Frankenstein’s Creature  turned into a Monster. One theory, in line with modern psychology, is that the Creature was hated  by its Creator because it  was repulsive to look at . The unloved child became the criminal. If  only Viktor had cared for it- by , for example, creating a wife for it – all would have  have been well.

 At the end of the novel, a dying Victor Frakenstein entreats the narrator who tells his tale, to ‘‘seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”. But,  of course, ’science and discoveries’ can never be innocent.  

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein one can find  recognisable features of the scientific/ technological spirit of our  own time, as it strives  to create an  an  inhuman form of humanity. 

II. A Modern Frankenstein: John  von Neumann

The first half of the twentieth century produced several real-life Frankensteins.   The most remarkable,  in his genius, ambitions, and effects  was the Hungarian mathematician  John von Neumann (1903=1957).

A   book about him   called MANIAC has recently been published, written  by the South American Benjamin Lapatut. I wish I had had  it before I wrote my own MINDLESS.

Johnny Neumann was a mathematical prodigy.He invented  the  mathematics  of quantum mechanics, of the electronic computer,  and  the atomic bomb. With  Oscar Morgenstern he invented    game theory,  with  applications to both  economics and military strategy. . .He  foresaw   the so-called Singularity -the moment when machines surpass humans in everything humans do.   He   promised  godlike control over the Earth’s climate. 

What fascinates me  about  theNeumann story is its  mixture of the divine and diabolic:  his  genuine belief in mathematics as the path to  salvation coupled with his acceptance of evil as the agent of good, his view of ftechnology, however destructive,  as the price of progress, whichled him to turn his maths towards  creating weapons of mass destruction power. His life sums up the spirit of the machine age which saw  in science and technology the  only antidote to human wickedness   revealed in the two world wars.  It barely occurred to them that they might be fathering   even more extreme  forms of madness.  

Putting it very simply,  an influential group of mathematicians and scientists, largely Hungarian -why Hungary I ask myself? – saw in  mathematics     the only  answer to human irrationality. Maths    would put  reason in uncontestable control  of   human afairs. Since mathematics  promised  a way of proving or falsifying any proposition, there would be no   space for the windy militant trash  which drove  populations  to orgies of mass killing.   

 The  quest for the  certainty which could both legitimise some behaviours  and  eliminate others    had a profound effect on 20th century   philosophy, politics, ethics, and  economics. Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery is perhaps the best known application of the falsification principle to both the natural and human sciences.  The quest to eliminate partial narratives and  ‘fake news’ from public discourse is  a notable feature of our own day  ,   even as social media provide ever more opportunities to express them.

 More broadly, our  modern Frankensteins   came out of an Intellectual atmosphere in which the  old religion had broken down, but not the need for religion. Lost faith left  a gaping hole which needsedto be filled. Communism – Arthur Koestler’s  God That Failed – is the most famous example of a creed which viewed itself simply  as social mathematics.  Zamayatin’s  great  dystopian novel  We  (1920) pictures a political system whose legitimacy rests on the truths of  maths.

Following  the lead of the German mathematician David  Hilbert,   Neumann  argued   that  a  mathematical programme to control society  could be built on  a finite set of axioms and rules of inference, as solid as those of geometry.   This   foundation    would make possible   a non-contradictory social logic :  a secure basis for all thought and action.

At Konigsberg in Sept 1930, the Hilbert-  Neumann dream of salvation through maths was torpedoed  by a graduate student  called Kurt Godel , who  before the assembled mathematical luminaries stammered  out what  came to be called his incompleteness theorem..  Godel showed that   no formal system can be both complete and consistent.On could not prove the truth of maths by maths.       Some bits of maths were undoubtedly true,   but unprovable;  so  consistency -freedom from contradiction –  cannot be guaranteed by mathematics. 

Following Godel’s demolition of  his ideal  project,  Neumann  ‘‘became a renegade mathematician, a mind for hire, increasingly seduced by power’.  Emigrating to the United States, it became his overriding  purpose to apply mathematics  to weapons.The aim of course was benevolent:  to save the world from Hitler, subsequently from Stalin,  but the method now explicitly involved the acceptance of evil as a means to good.  Neumann  was one of mathematicians shipped off to a  secret laboratory in New Mexico which housed the   Manhattan Project.

After the  war  Neumann continued working on what Einstein called ‘the great technologies of death’This led to famous academic rows with Einstein and  Oppenheimer. Einstein wanted to stop further development of atomic weapons.   Neumann  agreed that the scientists were  creating  a monster. But they had to go on with it, not just for military but for ethical reasons. ‘It would be unethical’, he said,for scientists ‘not  to advance  what  they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.

Like that other lapsed mathematician Bertrand Russell,   Neumann advocated a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Permanent  peace -an undoubted good – required we rain nuclear hell on  the Russians   before they developed weapons of their own. A  Pax Americana would be built on a   heap of corpses.  A  nuclear first strike before the enemy had nuclear weapons  was the only    rational course of action. 

In his book, Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1944) co-authored with Oskar Mogenstern, Neumann provided the maths for   the deadly game of MAD, or Mutually Assured |Destruction. a game of chicken played out on a planetary scale with weapons which could  blow up the  entire world.

The flaw in game  theory is obvious enough: it  presupposes  perfectly rational and logical agents,interested only in winning (maximising their utilities]   who possess  perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all past moves,  with flawless awareness of the ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions at every single stop in the game.  It did not take a Keynes to point out that .normal people are  not like that. He based  his economics on a denial of all these propositions ,but we still teach  economics  as though it was a ‘game’ in the Neumann sense. 

In 1946 Neumann promised the  US military that he would build them a computer powerful enough to handle the intricate  calculations needed for the building of a  hydrogen bomb. The machine was the  Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. MANIAC. Its first use was to provide a mathematical programme for thermonuclear weapons.

Looking at the history of our modern Frankensteins it is remarkable how the   most creative and most destructive of human inventions arose at exactly the same time in history. As Richard Feynman has pointed out,  ‘So much of the high-tech world we live in today, with its conquest of space and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H bomb could be built or not’.

Yet  had he lived into our own times, Neumann would have been able to justify his work, by saying that for  seventy years or so,   MAD and MANIAC between them  held  in check the greater Madness of a Thermonuclear War.

The second goal von Neumann  set for MANIAC was to develop   new kinds of life.  He said:  ‘You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that’. The  workshop held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the summer of 1956 is seen as the birth of AI.. Its proposition  that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it’ was pure  Neumann. 

In 1955,  Neumann was  appointed by Eisenhower as one of six  heads of  the US Atomic Energy Commission. In his first paper,  he proposed using hydrogen bombs  to divert the path of hurricanes. ‘All processes that are stable we shall predict, all processes that are unstable we shall control’.

In February 1957 Neumann died in the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, surrounded by military types  desperate t o catch his last words on how to get the better of the Soviets.  In one his last letters he wrote:  ‘Cavemen created the gods. I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same’  The modern world  needed new gods able to bridge the divide between thought and computation.   He wrote ‘.If we could understand the  primordial language of the brain, it would  transform the  prospects of mankind.. Perhaps some day we could begin  to merge with machines…… He never thought of blocking  the road to merger.   ‘For progress there is no cure’, he said.  

III. Transhumanism or Frankenstein Today

Today’s Frankensteins are a mixture of high-tech multibillionaires, scientists, and philosophers of science, united by the common goal of developing super-intelligent beings   to save humanity from itself.  They are after  ‘generative AI’,  ‘a type of AI ‘,  Google tells us blandly  ‘that can create new content…..’;  more understandably a type of AI that can think for itself.   Since its thoughts will not be burdened by human fallibility, it will be able to think better than humans, and thus behave  more rationally..It is the latest iteration of the dream of creating God. But can we be sure that the thinking for itself  AI  will be a benevolent God.  Some of the money men and scientists are having  doubts. In 2023 Elon Musk  called for   a six month  pause for reflection; other have asked for a longer pause  before allowing the ascent to  super intelligence. However these are only pauses to allow us to develop  fail-safe mechanisms.The God Project itself remains on track, seemingly irreversible. 

It  has acquired a new philosophical legitimacy called Tranhumanism,  which the philosopher Eric Torres sees as ‘quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today’.

Its leading lights are three philosophers, William MacAskill, Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord.   Nick Bostrom is head of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, which also houses Toby Ord’s Centre for Effective Altruism. William Macaskill heads  a  Global Priorities Institute.Similar institutes and think tanks are to be found in other universities.  Their  creed is long-termism, their  modus operandi, effective altruism. They preach escape  from human to superhuman intelligence as the only  way of salvaging what they think of as  humanity.  Their institutes  are  financed by high tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.  

What is valuable about transhumanism is that it alerts us to the destructive power of modern technology. But it is then led by a perverse logic to advocate a transhuman (super-intelligent) form of technology which is profoundly inhuman. Humanity is cast as a reified construction, identified with the property  ‘intelligence’,  divorced from the actual life of persons.  This mistake of the Enlightenment is carried by transhumanism to the point of madness, providing  our contemporary   Frankenstein with  new intellectual toys. .  

The  philosophic starting point is  utilitarianism.  The goal of policy should be  to  maximise   the utility of the universe. The rightness of an action is to be judged by its long run consequences for utility.  The end justifies the means, no means are ruled out of court ab initio.  This is the way the game is set up. 

The next step on the road to madness  follows from the logic of counting heads. It is quantity of utility which matters, not quality. This means  treating everyone’s utility the same, including that of  those yet unborn.  Thus the goal is not to maximise the utility of the present generation, but of all feasible  future generations, of which this generation will form only a tiny fraction. Ethically  speaking, the utility  of our generation should make only a tiny claim on our moral concern.  As Ord puts it: ‘because, in expectation, almost all of humanity’s life lies in the future. almost everything of value lies in the future as well’. Effective (or impartial)  altruism prioritizes the interests of the yet unborn over those of the present generation.

The next step in  the argument identifies the goal of maximising the utility of the universe with that of maximising its intelligence potential, that is, its capacity for creating value. Humans are unique among animals in their cognitive ability. Their cognitive potential has steadily  advanced  through the operation of the  Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest,  and with  billions of survivors now inhabiting the planet,  humanity’s  intelligence is exploding  Moore’s Law about the exponential increase in computing power is an example.  If intelligence is identified with Big Data and Computation then there would seem to be no limit to machine learning.

As Ais grow in in telligence, they will take charge of evolution. Already Ais are starting to be  built which can equal the best of human intelligence. It is more than likely, and sooner rather than later, that humans will be able to design superintelligent AIs. Bostrom defines superintelligence as ‘any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest’. Since the design of machines is one of these cognitive performances,  modestly super-intelligent  machines will design even better machines to replace them;  there would then ‘an intelligence explosion’. A population of super -intelligent AIs would take over the business of evolution leaving the intelligence of man far behind. Thus ‘the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make’. The evolutionary torch will have  passed from humans to AIs.

The logic grinds on remorselessly. The body depends on the finite resources of our planet. But super- brains would be able to detach themselves from the limitations of  the body. They  might then  escape from the limitations of our world, and establish colonies in our planetary ‘light cone’, to be ‘fed’ from its still unexhausted ‘endowment of negentropy’ (or reverse entropy) in our cosmos. Humanity ‘s intelligence potential   could then be preserved and expanded for millions of years until the sun finally cooled. Actual humans  are nothing but means to this end, and therefore valuable only insofar as they contribute to the overall net amount of value in the Universe between the Big Bang and the Heat death. This is the philosophic/ moral basis of the billionaire-financed projects of escape to the moon and other planets. 

At this point eschatological urgency seizes control of the transhumanist argument. The transhumanists share the view of the Doomsday scientists that AIs programmed with human intelligence only might quite possibly produce a nuclear or environmental catastrophe. Ord pays particular attention to ‘near misses’  during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. However, even such catastrophes need not be fatal to our intelligence potential, provided there are survivors.In this scenario echoes of biblical prophecy are mixed with the more sinister eugenicist musings of Dr. Strangelove, the ‘mad’ scientist of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film of that name, who suggested preserving  the best of humanity in deep mines following a nuclear catastrophe.  

However, with  superintelligent AIs in charge of even more potent weapons of mass destruction than those available today there might well be no survivors., either human or artificial. Thus the coming of superintelligence offers the possibility of either immortality  or total disaster.We aim  to create a benevolent God, but it is always possible that like in the  Frankenstein story,  he or she may turn out to be a Deus Malignus, who might only pretend to have good intentions, but  once unchained, would set about destroying not just us but its AI rivals. 

So before they finally take over  our superintelligent AIs  must be programmed with moral rules.  But the only moral rules  available come from   our own imperfect and conflicting  moral values.  Wriggle as  they   might, transhumanists cannot escape the dilemma that there is no possibility, in a world of  value relativism, of binding  superintelligence to  an agreed morality.To put it in transhumanist terms, why should super-intelligent AIs be effective altruists?    So the benevolence of our future controllers cannot be guaranteed. 

While recognising the risk to humanity of super-intelligent AIs, transhumans are too entranced by their dream of a cosmic  computronium to propose shutting AI  down before it reaches superintelligence. Thus Ord writes: ‘a permanent freeze on technology…would probably itself be an existential catastrophe, preventing humanity from ever fulfilling its potential’.  

One can easily see how remorseless logic unchecked by common sense and ordinary humanity can lead to madness. All follows from the commitment to untrammelled utilitarianism. Not only does this rest on hubristic claims about our ability to predict the future effects of our actions (the transhumanists assume a ‘perfect Bayesian calculator’) it is deeply corrupting, insofar as it tempts us to override the common decencies of life in the name of an abstract future good. William Blake put it well: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer’. Utilitarianism’s object of concern is not “my neighbour” – that is, the concrete other who confronts me – but the abstract individual Humanity. The idea of concentrating funds and  research effort to maximise  the unactualised possibility of intelligence throughout eternity is an extreme ( insane) form of  a Satanic project. 

Conclusion

At issue in the debate about automation  is what it is to be human. Today’s  scientists and technologists follow in the footsteps of Victor Frankenstein and Johann Neumann in aiming to develop machines which can improve on humanity.   The result is a peculiarly anti-human form of humanism. 

Take the debate about up-skilling. We need to be constantly upskilling humans to be able to race with the machines; only that way will we retain our place in a machine culture.  But what sort of place will this be?

Sharon Valler lucidly summarises the issue as follows:

 ‘While algorithms can outperform humans in manifold tasks, as well as learn new ones. they literally do not understand what they are doing. Understanding comes from context. The uniquely human labor of filling in the cracks between bits of data with unprogrammable awareness is what creates meaning and constitutes a whole reality. Yet the more our minds are trained by daily interactions with digital technologies to think like algorithms that lack understanding, the less intelligent and more artificial we ourselves become’.

From its inception the  Frankenstein project   has rested on on a materialist interpretation of the mind. Victor rankenstein formed his thinking  Creature from body parts. Descartes believed that the ‘soul’ (or mind as we now call it) was located in the pineal gland. The hunt for the ‘ghost in the machine’  has continued ever since. Scientific enquirers sliced up the dead Einstein’s brain hoping to find in it the seat of his genius.   The modern   consensus is that Consciousness exists, and is unique to humans,  but is simply a neurochemical structure of  exceptional complexity. In  understanding how the brain works one will have cracked the secret of consciousness.  It then becomes only a matter of time before science can breed thinking brains outside the human body.  At some point the human and Divine will meet.

But the older, and historically far more influential view, is that humanity is constituted by its imperfection. Evil  is a necessary part of the ‘great chain of being’, the physical and moral challenge God has set humanity. If all low and evil conditions and characters are eliminated, the harmony of the whole is irretrievably spoilt. 

Today we need to be concerned not about the possibility of conscious AIs, but about the threat posed by the AIs we already have or know how to make. 

I leave you with these questions. Can  we  stop certain lines of scientific enquiry   by not funding them?  Is everything invented bound to be applied?  Is it possible to confine scientific advance  to cases where the benefits are so clear as to be indisputable, eg medical advances. But as soon as one says this one realises that there are no unmitigated benefits or avoiding balancing the good and the bad. How this balance is determined will depend on our view of what it is to be human, that is, ultimately on a religious view of life’s meaning and purpose.   

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