Frankenstein and the Folly of Playing God: A Cautionary Tale for the Tech Age

By Paul Ponce

I recently reread Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, this time not as a bored high school student skimming for test answers, but as someone who’d just finished writing a first novel about mortals stealing fire from the gods in the age of AI.

And wow. What a difference a little life experience, and a lot of writing, makes. Turns out, this book has considerably more going on than a creepy stitched-up science project. It’s a philosophical gut-punch wrapped in Gothic horror, and it hits hard in our tech-saturated world.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus gets painfully interesting when you start looking at who takes responsibility for what. The annotated edition I picked up, based on Shelley’s 1831 text, gave me plenty to chew on through its commentary and analysis questions.

My main takeaway? Victor Frankenstein spends a lot of time describing his suffering for a man who keeps making other people pay for his decisions.

Victor is practically the Gothic prototype of the modern tech bro. Brilliant and obsessive, with the emotional maturity of someone who thinks a successful demo settles the ethical questions. He isolates himself to chase glory, creates life, and then... panics. The moment his creation needs something from him, he goes full ghost mode.

Shelley’s narrative structure still stuns. Captain Walton records Victor’s account, which contains the creature’s own story. We hear the accused through the man accusing him, inside letters written by someone with dangerous ambitions of his own. Quite a setup.

And it keeps making us reconsider who the monster is. The being who longs for affection and gets punished for existing? Or the man who creates life and then ditches it like a failed prototype?

The creature’s evolution from hopeful to heartbroken to homicidal is one of literature’s most tragic arcs. He begins innocent, then encounters abandonment and a world that sees only ugliness. That doesn’t excuse his murders. It makes them harder to dismiss as the work of something born evil.

At the end, he tells Walton he intends to burn himself on a funeral pyre, then disappears into the Arctic darkness. We never witness him carry it out. What stays with me is his grief and remorse, alongside the wasted potential of everything he might have become.

Shakespeare could’ve written that ending.

Reading his final confession, I couldn’t help thinking of Roy Batty in Blade Runner. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

I hear an echo of Shelley there. The supposedly inhuman being gets the moment that leaves the rest of us feeling painfully human.

So yes, the Prometheus metaphor still bites. Victor steals fire from the gods to animate flesh, but the consequences arrive through his own creation and the choices he makes afterward. His breakthrough becomes a legacy of ruin.

Sound familiar, Silicon Valley?

The annotations also sent me thinking about identity and gender, particularly how little room the men driving the story leave for anyone else’s judgment. Victor’s grand project bypasses women entirely. The women in his life get precious little say in his decisions, then suffer the consequences.

Would listening to somebody else have ruined the genius’s big moment? Apparently, we’ll never know.

As we race ahead with AI and biotech, building increasingly powerful things before agreeing on what we owe the people affected by them, Frankenstein feels uncomfortably current.

Victor achieves what he set out to do. That’s when his real responsibilities begin, and exactly when he decides he’d rather be elsewhere.

If you haven’t read it since high school, or ever, give it a shot. The annotated edition helped me slow down and notice things I’d sailed past when I was hunting for answers to a test.

This time, I finished with more questions.

Especially about the people who want credit for creating the future, but get strangely evasive when somebody asks who’s responsible for the mess.