The First AI Panic Happened in An 1818 Novel

What Frankenstein predicted about technology and Artificial Intelligence

In the summer of 1817, an 18 year old Mary Shelley begins to write what will, the following year, be published as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

I bolded the title just then because we often leave Shelley’s subtitle out when we talk about Frankenstein. But Prometheus - the figure from Greek mythology who stole fire from the Olympians to bestow upon humankind - is the beginning of literature’s engagement with technology: what we now call AI. And Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a nineteenth century iteration of that story, and still perhaps our most pertinent literature about rogue technology: our great Artificial Intelligence allegory.

If this all seems like a bit of a stretch - what can AI have to do with the foibles of the Greek Gods, or a 200 year old novel from a time before even the steam engine? - here’s a quick literary history of AI technology, followed by a Literature & Technology reading list for more in-depth research.

Prometheus, a Titan god, does not merely steal fire from Zeus to give to humans. He’s actually the one who creates humans to begin with: he builds them from earth, and they are animated by Athena. It is because Prometheus creates humans - helpless, cold, and desolate - that he feels obliged to bring them fire. And we also tend to leave out the fact that, along with fire, Prometheus brings humans other technological advancements of the time: math, architecture, astronomy, navigation.

Giuseppe Collignon, “Prometheus Steals Fire from Apollo’s Sun Chariot” (1814)

This is, in the myth, the origin of human intelligence. And, of course, human power. Empires rise and fall. Something happens when humans gain intelligence and, therefore, autonomy: they begin to ask questions about who rules, and to what ends. Is it the Olympians? Is it human Kings? Is it another God altogether?

Probably unsurprisingly, this makes Zeus very unhappy. Prometheus is fed to a vulture every day for eternity as punishment.

Rubens’ “Prometheus Bound,” circa 1611

If this sounds a lot like the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, you’re exactly right: the 1818 novel is a retelling of the Prometheus myth. And although Mary Shelley is concerned with a different worldview, and a different God, she’s asking the same kinds of questions: from where do we derive intelligence, and autonomy? Is intelligence a burden, or a gift? A right?

And when I write the word intelligence here I mean complex thought: that which is captured in Prometheus’ symbolic fire. Innovation, creation, discovery, curiosity. The human impulse to move ourselves and the world forward through predominantly technological advancements: intelligence, in this specific context.

In 1818, then, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein raises the same panic that Zeus felt, back when he watched as humans developed by virtue of fire. The novel’s dominant question: should Dr. Frankenstein have created such a monster - one of the saddest and loneliest characters in all literature - in the name of scientific advancement? And, even more broadly: what makes something human? Must they have a human body, or can they contain merely the essence of humanity?

In 1889, Paul Laurence Dunbar, a now almost obscure African American poet and novelist, writes the following poem called “Prometheus”:

Prometheus stole from Heaven the sacred fire
    And swept to earth with it o'er land and sea.
    He lit the vestal flames of poesy,
  Content, for this, to brave celestial ire.

  Wroth were the gods, and with eternal hate
    Pursued the fearless one who ravished Heaven
    That earth might hold in fee the perfect leaven
  To lift men's souls above their low estate.

  But judge you now, when poets wield the pen,
    Think you not well the wrong has been repaired?
    'Twas all in vain that ill Prometheus fared:
  The fire has been returned to Heaven again!

  We have no singers like the ones whose note
    Gave challenge to the noblest warbler's song.
    We have no voice so mellow, sweet, and strong
  As that which broke from Shelley's golden throat.

  The measure of our songs is our desires:
    We tinkle where old poets used to storm.
    We lack their substance tho' we keep their form:
  We strum our banjo-strings and call them lyres.”

He references Shelley at the end, but he’s referring to Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy. Nevertheless, I find this poem to be a remarkable amalgamation of the short literary history I’ve discussed here. Through the poem, Dunbar argues that poets and artists of his time have done the gods a disservice - their poetry is bad music compared to the godly stuff of yore.

Humans, he says, don’t deserve Prometheus’ fire, because they create such awful things with it. And they should give it back.

To me, this poem is especially pertinent to the present moment. Like Dunbar, we ask: what do we do with such innovation? Do we deserve it at all?

And if something goes wrong with our use of intelligence, who is to blame? The thing itself, or the people who created and bestowed it?

That all makes me think of another famous literary moment, which feels a lot like 2026, when we are at the cusp of something new. In Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest (1611), Miranda leaves her secluded island, a kind of paradise that’s untouched by human civilization. She’s off to the world of courts and balls and intrigue, with her new Prince. She says: “O brave new world, that has such people in it.”

Miranda by John William Waterhouse, (1875)

We all know which dystopian novel reuses that phrase to question technology in its own fascinating ways. AI can feel bleak, strange, unknown. We are accompanied by a long literary history that thinks so too.

Thank you for reading this short literary history of AI and technology!

Here’s a Literature & Technology reading list for further study:

Fiction:

• Tomorrow's Eve by Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1886)

• Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872)

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1920)

• Helen O'Loy by Lester del Rey (1938)

• After World's End by Jack Williamson (1939)

• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (1950)

• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein (1966)

• The Cybernetic Samurai by Victor Milán (1985)

Non-Fiction:

• "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin (1935)

• The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science

• On Wonder: Literature and Science in the Long Eighteenth Century (Elements in Eighteenth-Century), Chico

• Literature and Science, Aldous Huxley

• Technology, Literature and Culture, Alex Goody

• Technology, Modernity, and Democracy, by Andrew Feenberg