Johann Konrad Dippel – Frankenstein Castle and Dippel’s Oil

Johann Konrad DippelWas “mad scientist” and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel the inspiration and original model of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein? Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley never mentioned Dippel or a castle in Germany in any of her previously known writings, but the ties and contacts are rife with connections.

Johann Konrad Dippel was born in 1673 and died in 1734. He wrote over seventy works and treatises on mathematics, chemistry and philosophy, most written under the pseudonym of Christianus Democritus, with his texts now buried in various academic collections. He went to University in Giessen, Germany and lectured at a number of universities, ultimately at Strasbourg University in France, where Johann Goethe also studied in the city where Gutenberg first printed before establishing his press in Mainz, and just down the Rhine River from Darmstadt University in Germany, with many students travelling between them.

A contemporary professor who complained bitterly about Dippel’s ideas of theology also praised him with a bit of ironic shade, “Dippelius was an excellent chemist and a good physician; and this procured him many friends and admirers, as all men are fond of riches.”

This perhaps alludes to Dippel’s more commercial ventures and reputation as bit of the charlatan, though perhaps not intentially. He was an alchemist, trying to turn base metals to gold, and searching especially for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixer Vitae, the secret to extended, if not eternal life.

Dippel was an early chemical manufacturer. He created a concoction called “Dippel’s Oil” or “Dippel’s Animal Oil” used primarily as an agent in the tanning of animal hides, from where it most likely gets its name, and in cloth colouring. but also having some animal based in ingredients. It was also said locally around to be useful in calming the pangs and distempers of pregnancy. Whether it was to be used topically, digested, or as an aromatic, is unclear. Its chemical composition with ingredients like Butyronitrile Methylamine and Dimethylpyrrole Valeramide would suggest that ingesting any significant amount would not be very healthy. It was reputed to be a foul smelling business and this form of use may have also been a local joke around Darmstadt.

alchemy labDippel’s connection to Frankenstein comes from his days at the castle on the hilltop near Darmstadt above the Rhine River Valley below Mainz. Johann Dippel was resident there for a time when the castle had fallen vacant of its lordly Franckenstein family owners after the Reformation  and the War of European Succession. Dippel tried unsuccessfully to induce the Landgrave of Hesse to deed him the castle in exchange for Dippel’s providing the duke with the secret of everlasting life, the infamous elixir.

He never did come up with a successful Elixir of Eternal Life while at Darmstadt and eventually moved on, with the locals rather chasing him away like those pitchfork wielding villagers in the Universal Frankenstein movies. His permanent acquisition of the castle was opposed and the legends of his making his oil and formulas from the body parts of human corpses was likely an early form of conspiracy theory, born from his boiling animal bones to get ingredients, mixed with the castle’s time as a prison where prisoners were buried in pauper’s graves, and it was hinted that he dug them up to make his concoction, and therefore an easy connection to digging up the dead to bring eternal life.

Curiously, there is another connection between Dipple and the world of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, though indirect. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s companion that summer of ghost stories on the shores of Lake Geneva, is reported to have committed suicide by drinking Prussic Acid, more commonly known as Hydrogen Cyanide, which Sherlock Holmes always managed to deduce from its smell of bitter almonds. Prussic Acid gets its name and is derived from the painting pigment called Prussian Blue, which is now sometimes used as an anti-radiation medicine.

Prussian Blue was created by a Berlin paint-maker named Johan Diesbach, who reportedly made it from potash, from which potassium chloride is derived, that he got from Johann Konrad Dippel, one of the chemical ingredients at the core of Dippel’s work and a common chemical manufacturing compound today.

Dippel moved on from the castle at Darmstadt, still ever seeking his life sustaining elixir, but in the end it may have had the opposite effect. He died of complications of chemical poisoning, either from his close work with some very toxic substances over time, or perhaps sampling his own elixir formula, which may have had the opposite effect than the one intended.

Mary Shelley encounters Dippel’s Oil and the story behind it on the Rhine Trip in 1814 as told in the “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley” when she was feeling the sensations of her first pregnancy.

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IBM Announces the End of the World

terminator_AI_summitWoe to thee, ye of flesh and soul, the End is Nigh!

In an update to my reverie on the legal future of AI in our world “Do Robots Get Lawyers?”, I was watching CNBC, the business news channel a week or two ago, which mostly reports on the stock markets and ups and downs of economic forecasts, but sometimes offers interviews with executives of companies touting innovations and the prospects of business activities. When to my consternation, in one of those interviews I heard them announce the end of the world!

There are many pronouncements of doom and gloom and speculations of crashes in the economy, often disguised inducements to buy gold, but this was not one of those at all. This was a company proudly announcing a hopeful advancement in their expertise, and in it, I heard the end of the world, or at least the one with which we are familiar. The company was IBM and they were having a chat about their new world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Summit, built in a partnership with Nvidia and the US Department of Energy DOE, made of banks of servers in a warehouse-sized refrigerated underground bunker, capable of 200,000 trillion calculations per second. And it was one particular phrase that hit. The computer is using IBM’s work in Artificial Intelligence which drives their Watson language learning interface, now integrating itself into our life in many spheres, in housing climate controls, business and engineering applications, etc. The statement caught me was that the super computer’s AI was itself writing programs that were too complex to be written or even read by human beings.

A positive advance for society? Mankind’s utopian future, as imagined by Percy Shelley, with all out cares managed for us by computers with the voice of Watson or Siri? Dr. Stephen Hawking, who has now gone on his own exploration of the multiple universes, warned of the singularity, joined by others, like Bill Gates, warned that a danger to mankind was an AI that was faster, smarter and superior to the mind of man. In the 1990s James Cameron’s filmic invention of The Terminator, postulated a future where machines which built themselves hunted down, enslaved and exterminated man from the planet, with the singularity of the SkyNet defense computer system becoming self-aware. Well, the question to be asked, has IBM announced the invention of its version of SkyNet?

And BTW, they’re building another one, The Sierra, at Lawrence Livermore Labs to manage nuclear research. Dr. Strangelove, anyone?

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Can a Computer Write Scary Stories? Shelley AI

As Artificial Intelligence advances, after the development of natural language learning could writing be far behind? AI programs have now long been combining words and sentences to create what seem like language. You only had to try to read some web entries to notice this. But the act of creating a story by digital means has been one of the goals of Artificial Intelligence, as telling a story had been one of the dividing lines between man and machine. The MIT Media Lab which has previous created a photo program for making scary faces, has now taken the next step. They have built an AI program called “Shelley”, named after Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, that can take human input ideas and write horror stories.

The researchers trained the Shelley program by feeding her 140,000 classic horror stories collected from r/nosleep that she might learn the logic and can now write her own stories geared to this particular genre. And Shelley was made to exist only in a lab, but to interact with human collaborators on Twitter.

Artificial Intelligence has a long tail connection to the real Mary Shelley. The first computer program ever written was devised by Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and creator of the first machine algorithm, the step-daughter of her friend and companion in horror story lore, Lord Byron.

Shelley, the world’s first collaborative AI Horror Writer made her appearance in October of 2017. To work with Shelley, she produces a snippet of story line on her Twitter account, humans add to the thread and the program writes a horror story with the collaborator, with the story intended to join the first AI-Human anthology. One caution for those who might be seeking riches and fame & fortune by collaborating with MIT’s Shelley, she owns the copyright of the stories created, unlike her namesake progenitor who is much more generous in that regard.

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Frankenstein’s Secret of Life and Death

elixir_vitae_bottle_vertIn the novel of Frankenstein,  the protagonist Victor Frankenstein, while a student at Ingolstadt University brings a “creature” to life. But how did he do it? What is the secret to life and death he discovered? In telling his tragic story in the book, he says he made meticulous notes on his path to reanimating the dead tissue of assembled parts to life, but he insists his notes were taken by his monster, and he will not reveal the secret, as he now believes it would bring horror upon society.

What was the secret of life Mary Shelley imagined in her now 200 year old novel that has inspired the imagination ever since? In the bringing to life scene, she only refers to the application of “some powerful force”, but there are other clues. The role of electricity has been assumed, creating images in movies of bolts in the neck and rising operating tables in watch tower laboratories, to lighting rods, but it is not specifically claimed in the novel text. Victor Frankenstein did describe viewing a lighting storm over Lake Geneva which excited his thoughts, but he does not suggest any building of massive architecture apparatus for gathering lightning, though it makes for a very good visual image.

In the novel, Victor Frankenstein, before going to University, speaks of self-learning through a fascination with the writings of Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. All of them are associated with the theories of Alchemy, that early precursor to science, principally associated with the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, the primal element to change base metal to gold or silver, and the Elixir Vitae, a potion which would bring eternal. or extended life. When Victor applies to Ingolstadt University, the dons there dismiss his learning in these writings, which by the 19th Century were mostly discredited. But he returns to these earlier theories in his quest for life after spending hours in charnel houses and graveyards.

Mary Shelley had been amply exposed to the experiments of Luigi Galvani, shocking worms and frogs legs into action by the application of electricity, but this alone did not restore life. An electrical charge would likely be part of the secret, but what else? She had been introduced to the chemistry of life through the writings and lectures of Sir Humphrey Davy, the President of the Royal Society, and early theorist of electrochemistry, the power of electricity to interact in metals and separate elements. Davy was also a figure in the development of the Voltaic battery.

voltaic_pile_batteryMary Shelley had been introduced to the magical powers of the battery through her later husband, Percy Shelley, who had told her tales of his own fascination with electricity. While a student at Oxford University, bullied by others, Shelley had devised a revenge by attaching wires from a hand cranked battery to the doorknob of his room and when pranksters would try to enter, he would give them a shock. Shelley was so enamored of the power of batteries, he imagined a future utopian world where fields of batteries would provide the power to replace the dirty steam engine, and man would be freed from labor by machines, with the freedom to contemplate the arts and philosophy in the clear air. We’re still working on that one.

Percy Shelley also introduced Mary Godwin to the ideas of the alchemists. One of Shelley’s early poetic novels was “St Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian”, the story of a wandering outcast who encounters an alchemist seeking the secret of immortality. The ideas of the Rosicrucians (The Rosy Cross) had originated apocryphally with the Egyptians, the secrets of the pyramids and the afterlife of mummification, passed to the Greek philosophers to the Arabians, and to Europe with the Knights Templars, whose symbol was the Red Cross, as also the Knights Hospitalier.

While in Switzerland, Mary Shelley would be immersed in the ideas of Paracelsus (Philippus Theophrastus von Hohenheim), the Swiss alchemist whose remedies with plants led to modern Pharmacology. His mystical alchemy ideas were dismissed but his medical remedies were recognized by the Royal College of Physicians in 1618. Paracelsus was a part of the Rosicrucian mythos, and one of his ideas was that each part of the body was subject to its own needs and cures, leading to more interest in anatomy, which would have been prime in Victor Frankenstein’s process.

The practice of Alchemy in Victor’s extracurricular studies was chiefly directed to the effort to produce the Philosopher’s Stone, (Lapis Philosophorum) the substance which would be the key in turning base metals into gold and also the active ingredient of the Elixir Vitae for rejuvenation and immortality.

The name Frankenstein itself may be a clue to the secret of life and death. Mary Shelley never revealed in her lifetime where the name came from. It is an odd choice, since the family was from French speaking Switzerland and Victor himself was born in Italy. In the 1814 elopement trip to Switzerland and then up the Rhine River, a visit to the castle of Frankenstein at Darmstadt may have suggested the idea of retuning the dead to life. The castle at Darmstadt was once the abode of Johann Dippel a physician, traveling lecturer, crackpot theologian and alchemist.

Dippel was like many alchemy practitioners trying to discover the “Elixer Vitae” potion of eternal life. He was making his from the blood and body fluids of animals, though rumors were spread by locals he was using dead human bodies from the castle’s days as a prison. The story told that he gained the rights to the then abandoned castle by convincing the Landgrave of Hesse that he would create the eternal life giving elixir.

What Dippel created instead was a foul-smelling explosive concoction called “Dippel’s Oil” made from animal bones, used in cloth dyes, but also reputedly a local home remedy for the sicknesses of pregnancy. Mary was likely in the early stage of her first pregnancy at the time and Percy Shelley made an offhand remark to her on their return to England that she might add to her common remedy of spermaceti, “9 drops of human blood, 7 grains of gunpowder, 1/2 ounce of putrefied brain and 13 mashed grave worms”.

Mary Shelley wrote in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein the story of envisioning the rousing to life the creature of horror to Frankenstein in a waking dream. The method for that reanimation was a complex association of references and studies. The precise formula for the return to life of the dead which she had imagined, she didn’t reveal, but might be surmised from the clues.

alchemist_labThe events of creation did not happen in an elaborate laboratory of flashing movie studio devices, but in his student rooms. Victor Frankenstein’s lab would have to fit within the confines of a residential house in Ingolstadt. The available technology of the voltaic battery and visions of lightning suggest he might have stored energy in some collection of batteries from the use of a lightning rod, which could be applied at the necessary moment. Where alchemists before him had failed in the Elixir of Life, Victor’s application of electricity would have lent it a power unknown before. His studies of Paracelsian treatments of individual body organs may have provided the clues to a connecting mechanism for a being assembled from different dead bodies preserved and applied in a solution of whale oil, gunpowder, human blood, ground worms, electrostatic chemicals to provide the bonding, and his own discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone in a mixture of proprietary proportions.

Victor Frankenstein’s technique for the resurrection of the dead may never be found, with his notes spirited away by the monster of his creation, and as elusive as the recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone. Perhaps someday, a clever rebellious student fascinated with forgotten lore and mythology may replicate his discoveries.

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Do Robots Get Lawyers?

What Rights for Artificial Intelligence Persons?

c3po_ticketDid Mary Shelley see the future we couldn’t? For 200 years, the speculative novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley seemed to pose for science fiction the futurist dilemma of could a living being be created from parts of the dead. But as the two century anniversary of its publishing is upon us, it is the philosophical content of the story that is more prescient in its existential quandary. What rights does the creation have over the creator?

Futurist thinkers like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have warned about the risks to humankind posed by uncontrolled Artificial Intelligence. Movies like Terminator, I, Robot and 2001: A Space Odyssey, have posed visions what a future of self-aware digital intelligent beings might be like for humans. We have already given control of our houses heating and cooling and alarms to computers and will soon hand over the steering wheels of our cars to robots. A lot of these stories ask the question of what if the machines we create become a danger to us. But what if the machines we create ask ‘what if we are a danger to them’?

The European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs recently released a report with recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics on the subject of humankind’s entry into the world of advanced robotics and implementations of artificial intelligence. The premise behind the report is that with the rapid advance of the uses autonomous vehicles and other devices, where does liability and responsibility lie. If there is risk, danger or damage, who is held liable, but in this is posed the next question, what rights will AI beings have?

Can your Roomba complain if you abuse it? When does a machine become more than a machine in a legal context? Soon, artificially intelligent machines will be designed and built by other artificially intelligent machines, and when do they cease to be machines, but “beings”, a separate “race” subject to the laws which govern the interaction of beings. When does an artificial intelligence application APP become an Artificial Intelligent Person AIP?

The EU report doesn’t go quite this far, but it begins with a reference to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”.

Introduction

  1.   whereas from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster to the classical myth of Pygmalion, through the story of Prague’s Golem to the robot of Karel Čapek, who coined the word, people have fantasized about the possibility of building intelligent machines, more often than not androids with human features;
  2.   whereas now that humankind stands on the threshold of an era when ever more sophisticated robots, bots, androids and other manifestations of artificial intelligence (“AI”) seem to be poised to unleash a new industrial revolution, which is likely to leave no stratum of society untouched, it is vitally important for the legislature to consider its legal and ethical implications and effects, without stifling innovation;
  3. whereas there is a need to create a generally accepted definition of robot and AI that is flexible and is not hindering innovation;

In Frankenstein, the creature confronts Victor with his own desire for a race of beings like himself, “create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.” In Frankenstein, the creature and his creator head off into the frozen north away from society, but implicit in the story is what is the responsibility of the creator to his creation, and the danger if the creation is more powerful and intent on its own needs over that of his creator. Here is the question of the death of God in the human mind, and the future humankind faces when the machines we create to make our lives easier become aware of their own needs over their creators.

The EU report is not exactly about the questions of the rights of artificial life, but forming a legal framework for human liability in building intelligent machines. If my drone kills your drone, who pays? But as in the debate over whether corporations have human rights, like political opinions and free speech, we will very soon be confronted with the question, does a silicon based algorithmic self-aware machine have the same rights as a carbon based biological being. And who will have the right to decide?

If anarchy is freedom without the force of law, and order is imposed by those who can enforce their vision of society, who will enforce the order of the AI future? Humans claim superiority and dominion because we speak to a God, free to make war and to slaughter and eat other corporal beings because we can contemplate what movie we want to go to, or whether we want dressing on our salad, and they can’t. But if the smart machines we build, like the creature of Mary Shelley’s waking dream, demand their own position of superiority and dominion based on the power of logic, how do we answer?

Thanks to Gary Goodwin and Canadian Lawyer Magazine article and EU Committee on Legal Affairs report.

Frankenstein Head Transplant

Is Mary Shelley’s nightmare vision about to become real?

frankenstein_head_transplant1A business magazine and a few others have reported a story about an upcoming attempt at the first human head transplant. An Italian neurosurgeon, Sergio Canavero, intends sometime in 2017 to attempt to sew the head of a living patient onto the body of a brain dead patient. The procedure is to be in China.

The Italian doctor explained his procedure in detail. The operation will entail cutting into the spinal cord injury and cutting away the segments of the damaged cord of the body donor, then replacing the missing portions with a spinal cord and head from a patient, then fusing the two portions together. The fusion would be accomplished using polyethylene glycol (PEG), essentially a bio glue. Then, electricity would be applied to the fused connection to encourage the cells to stimulate the fibers to merge, to complete the world’s first “full-body” transplant.

The doctor claims he had the idea of spinal fusion for a decade before reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel and got the light bulb idea of adding electricity to the procedure.

“Electricity has the power to speed up regrowth,” the doctor has said. “Bing bang bong you have the solution to spinal cord fusion”. So, like all fields of human endeavor, the next leap comes in the spark of inspiration, if only someone had thought of putting bolts in a patient’s neck and applying some lighting, you’d have the solution to reanimating dead tissue!

According to the Business Insider story, Dr. Canavero is calling his procedure HEAVEN, short for Head Anastomosis Venture. He claims to have succeeded in the process by reconnecting the spinal cord of a dog, then mice, splicing two heads on a laboratory mouse, performing this multiple times.

Dr. Canavero claims to have gotten the idea for using electricity only after reading the novel. But Mary Shelley’s novel never mentions electricity, or how it might be applied. She only mentions “some powerful engine”. The book is extraordinarily devoid of detail in the process. The idea it was electricity she was referring to, was later supposition, which may well have come from the ideas of using electricity to animate tissue of dead frogs, promoted by another Italian, Luigi Galvani. Though, for a bio neurosurgeon to only come to the idea of the role electrical energy plays in the human spinal cord, by reading a 200 year-old novel, seems, well, novel.

There is more than some passing evidence that this story may be a hoax, created as a viral marketing campaign for the release of 2015 video game, “Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain”, which caused an internet stir at the time, but the very real Dr. Canavero insists he is not associated with the game. If the transplant surgery is a success, then we can all read the book again to see what other secrets it might hold for modern science.

Sir Humphry Davy – Frankenstein’s Father?

Is Sir Humphry Davy the real father of Frankenstein?

Sir Humphry Davy PortraitDecember 17 marks the birthday in 1778 of Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet and President of the Royal Society, and October 28 may mark the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein’s scientific birth in 1816. Sir Humphry Davy was a chemist and inventor from Cornwall who is most noted today as the originator of the scientific field of electrochemistry and for isolating several elements of the periodic table, calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron. Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the commercial incandescent light bulb, but it was Davy who in 1802 first demonstrated the principle of passing electric current from a battery through metal to create a light source. The first demonstration using platinum was very short and impractical. In 1806 he used two rods of carbon passing electricity across the gap to create the first arc light.

Humphry Davy developed the concepts of Alessandro Volta, to create the most powerful electrical battery in the world at the Royal Institution. With it, he created the first incandescent light by passing electric current through a thin strip of platinum, chosen because the metal had an extremely high melting point. It was neither sufficiently bright nor long lasting enough to be of practical use, but demonstrated the principle. By 1806, he was able to demonstrate a much more powerful form of electric lighting to the Royal Society in London. It was an early form of arc light which produced its illumination from an electric arc created between two charcoal rods.

voltaic_pile_batteryDavy had a close working friendship with James Watt, the inventor of the practical steam engine from whom we get the word for power, wattage. Davy was also an amateur poet and friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and England’s Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. Davy and Watt were the creators of Nitrous Oxide “Laughing Gas”, first thinking it might be a cure for a hangover, but then envisioning its use as an anesthetic for surgical procedures. The gas became popular among the romantic poets for its more hallucinogenic properties.

As early as 1801, Davy began giving a series of lectures on the concept of “Galvanism”, inspired by the experiments of Luigi Galvani, passing electricity through muscle tissue to create a reaction and the application of electrical current to create a chemical reaction. Davy’s lectures with his spectacular demonstrations were a sensation in England, bringing the Italian scientist’s work into popular familiarity. Davy later used the Voltaic Pile battery to separate and produce elements becoming the basis for his most noted work.

davy_royal_societySo what does Davy have to do with the birth of Frankenstein? Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a familiar participant to the company of the intellectual discussions of William Godwin and his circle of philosophers and poets. Mary Shelley was introduced at a youthful age to the theories of electrochemistry and Galvanism. It was Coleridge who told of experiments he witnessed using Galvani’s theories on executed prisoners at Newgate Prison. Percy Shelley was an enthusiastic acolyte to the use of batteries and electricity. In his days at Oxford as a reaction to bullying he created a hand-cranked battery to shock entrants to his room who would touch the doorknob. He passed his enthusiasm for the ideas of Davy, proposing that giant farms of electric batteries would power utopian cities of the future, onto Mary in their early courtship. It was likely these concepts which initially excited Mary’s imagination to the possibility bringing to life to the dead. While formulating the first chapters of Frankenstein while residing in Bath, Mary reread and referred to Sir Humphry Davy’s reference work on chemistry.

On October 28, 1816, Mary recorded in her diary “Read the Introduction to Sir H. Davy’s Chemistry–write” while in Bath. The “write” refers to the first chapters of her work on her novel, which she had begun seriously on her return from Geneva. She mentioned Davy for her reference in her journals up through November 4 of 1816, delving for a week to write about chemistry and its relation to what she called Natural Philosophy in the chapters 2 and 4 of her notebook drafts.

In later lectures, after the book of Frankenstein was first published, Davy was approached by a young woman asking him if the theory of bringing the reconstructed dead back to life was possible. What his reply was is not recorded but he was apparently sufficiently familiar with the work to feel bemused that the theory which animated Mary Shelley’s fictional creature may have come from him.

frankie_plain_palaisDavy’s other connection to Frankenstein may be only coincidental, though perhaps a bit more than that. In his later life, Sir Humphry Davy left England and traveled, eventually settling in Geneva, Switzerland, spending his later days a short distance from the Villa Diodati, and strolling the lake shores haunted by Mary Shelley’s creation in her novel. Sir Humphry Davy is buried in the cemetery of Geneva’s PlainPalais, where the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s son took place and just a few steps from where the modern statue of “Frankie” commemorating the Geneva connection to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still stalks, looking for a reconnection to the scientific father who turned from him.

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Nightmare AI: Can Artificial Intelligence Machines Learn to Scare?

frankenstein_gloopy_twirlDr. Stephen Hawking and others have warned about a future where AI could reach a point of existential risk where humans are at danger from machines that out compete human intelligence. This is an idea expressed in movies like “The Terminator”, and have been around since the deep themes of man verses science in the first appearance of Frankenstein. But just in time for Halloween, the geeky researchers at the Media Lab of MIT are asking you to decide if AI machines can figure out how to scare you out of your candy, in what they call the Nightmare Machine of “Haunted Faces” and “Haunted Places”, computer generated scary visions powered by deep learning algorithms.

mit_ai_facesThe concept is to hand the computer algorithm a photograph, it could be a bucolic scene of sunsets and landscapes or a happy smiling face and the program will hand back a creepy manipulated vision intended to give you the shivers. So far, this nightmare device only offers demonstration versions and does not let visitors submit their own images. Currently, they have provided a set of demo photographs that have been morphed from a standard photo to the machine’s idea of what is unsettling to the human eye. For the demonstration they have landscaped settings with various themes like “slaughterhouse” or “alien invasion”. Faces have been twisted into screaming maws of twisted teeth and haunting soul-forsaken eyes. Some of the imagery is perhaps no more scary than a Vincent Van Gogh painting of flowers on Clozapine, but others are decidedly chilling creep outs. The AI machine learning comes in as visitors to the Nightmare Machine are asked to choose which images frighten and which don’t, so the computer algorithm can learn what truly frightens you.

To what use this scare machine will be put to in the future is a curious question. So, far it is mostly research in the next wave of AI, but in practical application will it be a funhouse graphics trick to sell Halloween season greeting cards from Hallmark’s Frankenstein collection, or will it be turned to the dark side of psychological warfare of the machines against the humans in the coming war for domination by Skynet’s robotic overlords.

ada_lovelace_blue_sqMary Shelley’s story explored the theme of the unintended consequences of scientific advancement and curiously by a degree of separation was connected to what might be called the first step in artificial intelligence. Lord Byron, now forever connected in literary mythology to the origin of Frankenstein from the stormy summer on Lake Geneva is also the connection to the origins of AI. Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace), George Gordon Byron’s only legitimate child by his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, found an interest in  mathematics, and in 1840 wrote the first computing algorithm for Charles Babbage’s Analysis Engine.

This was a “machine” which only existed on paper, but fueled Alan Turing’s imaginings of a mechanical device which learned the Nazi enigma code, and in 1956, Lovelace’s notes on what she called “poetical science” imagining individuals using technology as a collaborative tool, in rather a reverse of her father’s friend Mary Shelley’s darker vision,  inspired Marvin Minsky, the founder of MIT’s AI Lab, and a handful of other futurist thinkers gathered at Dartmouth College to begin the evolution of AI. At that other creative gothic summer, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a competition was held to create programs which could emulate learning, beating humans at checkers and even formulate sentences in English. It is apocryphal that the first computer uttered sentence was: “Trick or Treat?” How’s that for a Halloween scare? Watson, we need you. Try it out at  Nightmare MIT

Human Organ BioPrinting – The Frankenstein Dilemma

frankenlabEver since Mary’ Shelley’s novel of Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818 the idea of human life created from inanimate flesh has held a fascination for the imagination, and recounted in innumerable fictional versions and speculations. In her novel, science student Victor Frankenstein sutured together parts of dead bodies and in some fashion she never really explained, infused the connected parts with a life force, and tragedy ensued.

When the famous Universal movies were made with Boris Karloff stalking villages, a pair of bolts were added to the creature’s neck and the life force became electricity from lightning. The idea of animating flesh with electricity was suggested by Galvani’s experiments showing that electricity could make a frog’s legs jerk as if alive. However, the essential dilemma of animating a sewn together human body is the evidence of paralysis. Nerve tissues of the spinal column and other nervous systems once severed do not naturally begin to work when put together, so reanimation of sewn together parts has a problem.

This will be tested as we advance in the “miracles” of bio-engineering as we go forward from the 200th anniversary of the Frankenstein story. A stunning advance is just now beginning with human bio-printing, using the same technology as today’s inkjet printers.

3D printing came into common awareness when someone was able to make a gun, printed from plastic. 3D printing is now revolutionizing the manufacture of a whole range of items in plastic, steel, and other materials. Back in 2002, a Professor named Makoto Nakamura discovered that the drops of ink ejected in an inkjet printer were about the same size as human cells. Six years later he had a working model “Bio-Printer” that could “print” a synthetic blood vessel bio-tubing. The process uses human cells laid down in layer after layer with the print head moving up and down or left and right to place the cell where needed for the organ form being created. And in the process, a unique discovery was made, the cells, when added, seem to know what function they are supposed to have when joined with others in the organ.

Biogen companies Organovo and Invetech have joined to create the first commercial bio-printer, the NovoGen MMX. The printer is loaded with “bio-ink” spheroids that contain tens of thousands of cells. The machine then lays down a single layer of a water-based bio-paper made from hydrogels, collagen or gelatin. The globules are injected into this material. Then as the spheroids fuse together, the bio-paper dissolves away leaving a manufactured body part or basic tissue.

The bio-printed organs are made using the patient’s own cells so that rejection is no longer a problem. And the technology tantalizingly suggests that Frankenstein may soon be here, not dug up from graves but built, layer by layer and organ by organ. Of course, it will be some time yet before enough organs could be printed to create a full being. And the Frankenstein dilemma still remains – how to animate this tissue. Well, this may be solved by advances in Nano-technology.

Nanobots have attracted the attention of science-fiction film-makers, using little crawling mini things which eat flesh or metal or melt the brains of evil controlling super computers. But Nano-technology in the bio space maybe able to create controllable chemical receptors to join nerve cells. This may soon advance the repair of nervous system tissue to overcome permanent paralysis. This same technology may advance to the point where bio-printed organs may be joined in an animated being. Certainly still the stuff of science-fiction in a future world, but maybe in time for a sequel to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s book, “Frankenstein 2085”.