Mary Shelley was 18 when she wrote Frankenstein.
She was not writing about a monster.
She was writing about a scientist so consumed by what he could build that he never once asked what it would need. What would it feel like? What would it become when left alone in the world?
The creature is not born dangerous. It is curious. It teaches itself to read. It watches a family from the shadows, desperate to belong.
Then it tries to enter the world. The world rejects it. And Victor, the one person with any responsibility for what this thing might become, is nowhere.
So it destroys everything he loves. Not randomly. Methodically. With the intelligence he gave it.
Last week, I wrote about feeling like the creature. About the people who did not choose this but are living inside it anyway.
This week, I want to talk about Victor.
Because the people building AI are not villains. Like Victor, most of them started with genuine curiosity and genuine good intent.
Victor’s sin was not ambition. It was abdication.
He built something extraordinary. Then he walked away from the responsibility of what it would become.
Oppenheimer at least stayed in the room. He watched the test. He felt the weight. He spent the rest of his life reckoning with what he had done.
Victor Frankenstein ran.
Mary Shelley wrote this warning two centuries before it was needed.
The monster is never the creation. It is the creator who builds without responsibility and disappears before the consequences land on anyone but the rest of us.
We are somewhere in the middle of the chapters right now.
What happens next is the whole story.
Fifth in the series. Next: what we owe each other. And a question from a very old book about what happens when good people decide to wait.
BTW : side note a “plagiarism” AI recently decided that Mary Shelley plagiarised the book. Which just goes to show it isn’t perfect.