Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Frankenstein

What is life, and what makes human life unique? With the rise of the life sciences and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century, new answers to these questions were proposed that were deeply at odds with traditional understandings and beliefs. With the advent in the twentieth century of new, life-altering technologies like genetic engineering, and lifesimulating sciences like Artificial Life (ALife), these questions became even more insistent.

Moreover, after World War II, efforts to build fast, intelligent machines and the subsequent development of the computer made the assumption of human intellectual superiority seem uncertain and sure to be challenged, especially since the new science of Artificial Intelligence seemed to lead inexorably to the construction of superhuman machine intelligence. Indeed, both ALife and Artificial Intelligence (AI) dramatically encouraged the thought that the opposition between the natural and the artificial, the born and the made was no longer so hard and fast, and certainly not inevitable. Yet this philosophical conundrum was hardly the central issue or worry.

Rather, it was the nagging possibility that henceforth the evolutionary dynamic might begin to act on a biosphere soon active with non-natural life forms and that its crowning achievement – namely humanity itself – might eventually be displaced and superseded by its own technical invention. In short, many feared that the future would be determined by some cyborgian, post-biological form of the posthuman, or that the human species might be eclipsed altogether as evolution’s torch of life and intelligence passed to its artificial progeny. It was inevitable, therefore, that the possibilities of both ALife and AI would begin to be explored, variously and even idiosyncratically, by literary writers.

Here, “ALife” will simply refer to new and non-natural forms of life brought into existence through external and technical means at least initially under human control; similarly, “AI” will refer to some kind of human-constructed machine intelligence (usually an advanced computer) capable of performing actions of such complexity that they require a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans. As we might expect – given that life has always been assumed to be a precondition for intelligence – ALife was of interest to imaginative writers long before AI.

Specifically, ALife became possible as a fictional interest with the beginnings of the properly scientific study of life, that is, with the emergence of biology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whereas AI, with rare exceptions, became a serious fictional interest only after the birth of the computer. Interestingly, the official births of the professional scientific disciplines devoted to ALife and AI – in 1987 and 1956, respectively – reverse this chronological order. However, in regard to ALife and AI as fictional themes, the most important background influence was not only the computer but also the immense transformation of biology and the life sciences by cybernetics, information theory, and modern genetics (specifically, the discovery in 1953 of how DNA functions).

For many readers, in fact, the contemporary emergence of these themes in fiction will be associated with the historical amalgamation of technics and science in what has become known as technoscience and its more recent condensation, cyborg science. No doubt the first modern narrative about ALife is Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. It was followed by a number of wellknown literary classics that, from the contemporary perspective that now post-dates the official inauguration of the new science of ALife, could well be said to be concerned with ALife avant la lettre.

Specific examples would include H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You. However, with the accelerated development of computer technology, machine intelligence as a source of worry or “problem” theme becomes more prominent, particularly in the rapidly growing new popular genres of science fiction and film. Nevertheless, although ALife and AI can be clearly distinguished as two new sciences of the artificial, they do not always operate as distinctly different fictional interests, but are often intricately related in a number of interesting ways.

For example, in Astro Teller’s novel exegesis (1997) a computer program – specifically, a data miner called “Edgar” – unaccountably becomes “smart”; in the special terms of AI, he or “it” is smart enough to pass the Turing test. However, the protagonist Alice, the human with whom Edgar regularly communicates, openly doubts that he is in any real or biological sense “alive.”

Conversely, Michael Crichton’s novel Prey (2002) combines both ALife and AI: the nano-swarms engineered by the company Xymos Technology, while clearly of unnatural origin, seem “alive” by any standard biological definition – they require food, reproduce, and evolve – and thus are a form of ALife. But they are not especially intelligent. In fact, their intelligence is based exclusively on a few algorithms that model simple predatory and learning behaviors. Thus the swarms never display anything approaching human intelligence and remain a very limited form of AI.

First published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is usually read as a novel about a scientist’s continuing refusal to assume responsibility for his Promethean creation. Shelley’s narrative also manifests two thematic interests that will become central not only to the official new science of ALife, but also to a significant body of contemporary fiction that bears the latter’s stamp or ethos even when there is no evidence of direct influence.

This first interest is not simply in the creation – or re-creation – of a life form, but also in the definition of life and how it is to be distinguished from non-life or inert matter. In Shelley’s novel this interest is inscribed in the “spark” that reanimates and thus brings to a living, self-aware state the assemblage of human bones, tissue, and organs that Victor Frankenstein has brought together on what is probably the first entrance of the dissecting table into fictional discourse; but it is also evident in the network of subtle references to the scientific debate between vitalism and materialism that had raged in London from 1814 to 1819 (much of it publicly staged) and in which Percy Shelley’s (and Byron’s) personal physician, William Lawrence, had participated.

The second interest is reproduction and the attendant possibility of evolution, which enter the plot of Shelley’s novel at a later turning point. This occurs when Frankenstein promises the Monster – as he comes to refer to the Creature on whom he believes he has bestowed life – that he will fabricate for him a female partner if the Monster will cease hounding him and depart for South America with his new mate.

Frankenstein, however, reneges on his side of the bargain. That Frankenstein will not repeat the act of creation both intensifies and leaves open to interpretation exactly how that act should be understood: as a human mimicking of divine creation or – in what amounts to a very different understanding of both human and vital agency – a setting up of the specific material conditions necessary for life’s emergence.

Throughout Frankenstein we are often made aware of the Creature’s frightful body and unbearable physical presence. The Creature is alive, but will always remain outside the life cycle. Contrarily, there is never any question of the Creature’s intelligence. Similarly, in Capek’s play R.U.R. the intelligence of the robots is not at all an issue; it is, rather, the fact that they cannot and do not know how to reproduce.

This is the secret that their human makers withhold from them. Thus in both Frankenstein and R.U.R., intelligence follows “naturally” from the fact of having a body, a living body, even if it originates in wholly artificial conditions. And here we can observe an absolute continuity with Huxley’s genetically and chemically engineered humans in Brave New World: in both play and novels, levels of intelligence stem merely from different chemical gradients.

However, all of this will change dramatically with the birth of the electronic or digital computer. Whereas the very concept of life requires a body, henceforth intelligence will seem to require only a computer or computational apparatus, which is usually made of inert matter. For the first time in human history, intelligence is divorced from life, thus making it possible to be intelligent but not alive.