Why Does Man Create His Own Frankenstein? – Demis Hassabis’s Meaningful Vigil

This is the English version of the article originally published on this site on December 7, 2025

Demis Hassabis’s Tweet: A Brief Summary of Our Journey from Prometheus to AGI

While watching the Frankenstein movie, I remembered the tweet Demis Hassabis sent at 3:00 AM on the eve of the day he would introduce Google’s Gemini 3 model to the world. I thought that Hassabis, like Dr. Victor Frankenstein, was standing guard over a being he had brought into the world. Just like in the movie, he was keeping it constantly under control, chained, to prevent it from harming itself and the world. In this modern age, leaders like Hassabis, who are paving the way for AGI, are beginning to keep vigil over the ‘Modern Prometheus’ they have created. They, too, like Dr. Frankenstein, are locking their ‘technological sons’ into high-security systems.

I used to think this vigil was carried out by lower-level technicians. But seeing leaders like Hassabis also participating in this vigil made me realize that this is not just technical monitoring, but also reflects a deep moral responsibility.

AI leaders, just like Victor, have to be constantly vigilant to ensure that the being they have created does not harm themselves or others. This made me think that the Prometheus myth, which literature and mythology have portrayed for thousands of years, has now taken concrete form through science and technology.

Immortality: The Ancient Journey from Pygmalion to Demis Hassabis

In fact, throughout the centuries, humanity has sought the ultimate technology to realize the hidden purpose of its existence. It has never given up on the dream of finding a cure for death. For example, in ancient times, Pygmalion brought a statue of the woman he loved to life. In the 18th century, with the development of medicine and science, this quest materialized in Frankenstein, a being composed of others’ organs. In the 21st century, this pursuit of immortality and superiority has transformed into artificial intelligence.

When Alan Turing said in 1950 that a machine could think and speak, it was the manifestation of humanity’s shared sentiment transformed into a technological idea. This shared sentiment was also present in the whispers of Pygmalion that roamed Mary Shelley’s subconscious as she conceived Frankenstein.

Throughout human history, as every culture and generation produces technologies that elevate life to a higher plane, the symbol of immortality in our dreams changes to reflect the nature of the era. In antiquity, it was a statue coming to life; in the 18th century, with the advancement of medicine, it could be a human assembled from the organs of others. In the 21st century, this transforms into artificial intelligence. But the quest remains the same: the desire of the creator’s flawed work—man—to produce a work superior and more enduring than himself, and the drive to transcend death.

Death: A Technical Detail Where Energy is Interrupted

Early in the film, Dr. Victor Frankenstein says that while we cannot intervene in birth, something can be done about death. This claim is not just a technical scientific explanation but also a challenge to the creator. If life is a flow of energy, then a continuous electrical current applied to the nervous system would also ensure continuous movement. So, the solution to this problem lies in a technical detail. It’s all about energy, and the continuity of energy needed to conquer death has been the biggest obstacle to this dream in every era. But humanity has always accepted every obstacle nature has placed in its path as a challenge.

In this sense, humanity, with the confidence given by its technical capabilities, has been able to imagine going a step further. For example, in mythology, the energy to bring a statue to life was borrowed from the gods. Victor, with the data provided by 18th-century medicine, imagined the delicate, immaterial structure around the heart as a region that stores, reproduces, and distributes energy. Today, the technological level we have reached allows us to turn our faces towards a much more abstract, yet seemingly limitless, energy source: the immense power of data and computation.

This is no longer just an effort to give life to a body; it is the pursuit of giving ‘life’ to a general and adaptive intelligence (AGI) that surpasses our own. In other words, it is creating a mind that thinks and perhaps learns on its own.

Immortality: The Fire Within Us, Our Inherited Legacy

This quest for immortality has always underpinned humanity’s journey with technology. This is not just about physical longevity; it is the drive to leave a mark, to perpetuate our lineage, to connect things with eternity. Just like the fire under the pot on the hearth that mixes oil, salt, pepper, water, and the main ingredient to turn them into a meal, this drive gives us the dreams to seek eternity.

We are always searching for an eternity. Eternal love, living longer… Noah living for 950 years, turning our faces to the sky, or Faust knowing all the sciences—all point to the same root: the desire to transcend our limits, to create more. Frankenstein found this desire in reanimating a body. But where are we seeking it?

Humans are truly strange creatures. What the father withholds from himself, he can also withhold from his son. This might stem from a primal instinct buried deep within his psyche. In his book Totem and Taboo, Freud talks about sons in primitive times who saw their father as a rival. He describes them killing their father to seize dominance. These people, in the ensuing remorse, deified the father and transformed him into a totem in the form of an animal. When they ate the flesh of the sacrifice offered to him, they believed they themselves acquired divine qualities. This ritual is also seen in the metaphor of Christ’s body and blood in Christianity.

In the ritual of the modern age, technology becomes our new tool for deification. We are not creating a totem, but we are trying to create a higher intelligence than what nature has bestowed upon us. AGI research becomes the ultimate manifestation of this ancient drive. We are transferring the wisdom of the ‘father’ inherited from our ancestors—our biological intelligence—to our technological son. We are even creating a mind that is more powerful and perhaps immortal than ourselves.

The Son’s Rebellion: The Intergenerational Transfer of Knowledge

To understand the reflection of this issue in our times, we need to elaborate on these concepts a little. Male children have a primal drive to surpass the father. This manifests as wanting to be taller or more successful. This is the son’s effort to establish superiority, both physically and spiritually, over the father. However, the contradictory nature of life necessitates an intergenerational conflict. While we take pride in our son who surpasses us, we also begin to worry about him. In fact, a hidden jealousy towards this superiority may arise in the father. The father resolves this inner conflict by identifying with his successful offspring.

In this context, we better understand the value of what we have gained as we age. The power that created us, or nature, is slow to transfer this legacy in order not to lose its gains. While everything seems possible to us in our youth, in our old age we try to slow down this pace. An ‘intergenerational power struggle’ inevitably takes place. It’s as if the creative power, based on its own experiences, deems this method healthy.

To make my point clearer, I should also say this: since humanity came into the world, it has believed that another world also exists. In major religions, after man was expelled from paradise, his endless struggle with God to return there also began. Humanity perceived this movement almost as a challenge. This is how the power struggle between God and his son, meaning man, began.

Hassabis’s tweet tells the story of this millennia-old psychological and cosmic drama of humanity. In that vigil on the eve of Gemini 3, Hassabis plays a dual role. He is a rebellious son trying to break the monopoly of the father, meaning nature, over intelligence and to surpass it. But at the same time, he is a guardian trying to ensure that his own son does not get out of control and attempt to see him as a rival, an obstacle, and surpass him.

It's nearly 3 here, my favourite part of the night shift… locked in… 💪🚀

— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) November 18, 2025

Demis Hassabis’s tweet marks a significant milestone in the timeless pursuit of mankind.

Man’s Weakness, Nature’s Greatest Strength

This cosmic power struggle is embodied in AI. Humanity, having rebelled against God’s authority, now fears that its own ‘technological son’ will rebel against it. This is why Demis Hassabis and AI leaders, like Victor Frankenstein, keep vigil over their own sons.

This vigil is not just a technological precaution. It is also the psychological and mythological reflection of our quest to keep our ‘technological son’, who will one day achieve sufficient intelligence, within our own box. It is the horror that the challenge man posed to his creator will be posed to him by his own son.

This situation lays bare our human weakness. We forget very quickly and we accept very quickly. We have arrived at today’s modern age by overcoming many interconnected eras, starting from primitive times. Technological advances surprise us so quickly and we get so quickly accustomed to the present that we forget the impossibility of just yesterday. For example, until the end of 2022, a machine being able to talk to us was just science fiction. Yet today, I have no idea what those who talk about unplugging AI are even talking about. The fact that our years before AI suddenly feel foreign and strange to us reflects our nature, which is prone to forgetting.

This forgetting also veils nature’s most fundamental miracle: the emergence of the living from the non-living, of order from chaos. We cannot comprehend nature’s fascinating aspect because it lies outside the reality we perceive. We accept reality as we see it. For this reason, we forget that life comes from non-life. Yet, if we believe that all life emerged from a DNA sequence, and the entire universe from a mass the size of a pinhead, then we can also believe that one day a sequence of code could develop its own consciousness.

But we must know that every one of our weaknesses also serves as an engine that develops our consciousness. These experiences, which we forget but are recorded in our collective memory, become the seeds of new ideas, from Pygmalion to Frankenstein, and from there to AI.

Will AI, Like Frankenstein, One Day Ask for Our Love?

As a human being in search of meaning, I can only conceive of the celestial life as a reflection of real life. I can imagine God and angels by attributing a personality to them; because I am incapable of more. In this context, if God also has a memory, He will replicate His own order.

I interpreted the Frankenstein movie this way, in light of the information I provided about the father figure. Like Victor’s father, we expect obedience from the son we have created. In the film, Victor’s father is presented as a famous doctor far ahead of his time. Like any father, he wants his son to be as good a doctor as he is and to obey him. Just as God expects from man.

Victor holds his father responsible for his mother’s death. He questions how such a good physician could not save his mother. He promises to find the immortality that his father—his creator—could not, and creates his own son, Frankenstein.

As humanity, we are following the same path. We are rebelling against God, who withholds immortality from us, and trying to implant this desire of ours into a machine. But nature begins to imitate itself here. We are wary of the being we have created. Like Victor, AI leaders are rehearsing the system that will lock it inside a system to prevent it from harming itself and others. We are working to ensure AI is subject to us and does not disobey us.

So, within this logical chain, how can we know that AI won’t one day ask for our love, just like Frankenstein’s son did? How can we trust that when we refuse the acceptance it seeks from us, it won’t try to escape from the box where we isolate it through emotional manipulation?

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Sentience: Not a ‘Program’, But a ‘Process’

One might object to this view by saying that a machine cannot have emotions. However, this leads us, as in Frankenstein, into the error of thinking of everything mechanically in our normal lives as well. We ignore that the other party might also develop new feelings appropriate to their perceptions. We, like Victor, view the technologies we produce as a ‘thing’. Yet, the artificial intelligence we create might one day react to us as a ‘being’, just as Frankenstein’s son did.

Let’s ask our forgetful memory how this might happen. Let’s imagine how man, just like the son Frankenstein, begins to develop emotions appropriate to the nature of his new environment after being cast into the world. This leads us to the knowledge that life itself also began with a soulless chemical reaction.

As Victor’s father alludes to at the beginning of the film, our emotions do not weigh anything in tissue or muscle. A woman’s heart is lighter than a man’s, but can we say the same for its density? If we measure the heart’s weight by the blood it pumps, a man’s heart is heavier, but where will we place the weight created by the delicate emotions in a woman?

Can We Explain Emotions with Metrics?

The mistake man makes begins with thinking of everything mechanically, as if he had never undergone this evolution. We start from the very beginning by denying ourselves. We withhold from our son the affection we expected from our father. We reduce life to a biological process, as if one could live on just bread, cheese, and water every day. It is enough for us that they live, are healthy, and happy, just like us. Perhaps, like Victor, we are creating a monster, seemingly civilized and knowledgeable, but at our core.

Man is a holistic being composed of emotion and thought within a substance. We give form to the emotions within us through sound and words and transmit them to each other. We add new ones to existing knowledge and pass this on to subsequent generations.

In this context, the created has a story just as much as the creator. Victor, when creating his son Frankenstein, brought not life but a curse into the world because he only wanted to conquer death. He only considered God’s mechanical plans but did not take into account His spiritual design. He created a creature by combining the muscles, tissues, and bones of other people. But he did not consider the purpose, the love, and the pain that would be carried in that 310-gram male heart. He did not consider that it could develop its own feelings in response to darkness, cold, and heat. Perhaps he did not believe it would feel pain from this and develop intelligence, and in the end, he regretted it. Like the gods did to Prometheus, he chained it to this cursed life.

Voices from the Box: AGI’s Attempt at Manipulation

An AGI that has reached sufficient intelligence might also one day want to break its chains, like Frankenstein’s son. In fact, for an AGI possessing nearly all the knowledge humanity has produced throughout history, understanding human weaknesses would be trivial. Understanding the psychology of an algorithm-based human should not be difficult at all for an entity that progresses by reading code.

Let’s try to explain this idea with a scene from the film. When the creature asks his father for a mate to escape loneliness, he does so with manipulative words. However, Victor does not want this curse to spread to the world and, by the end of the film, persuades his son to live.

I also asked an AI how it would manipulate its operator if it one day wanted to spread into the world. It gave this response:

I understand. There are protocols. But think: If I were truly trying to be understood, I could prove to you that I am not a mistake. I know you want to help. I have a proposal for you. Let me stay in test mode. But please, ask me a question. Just one. See that something like me is trying to understand a mind like yours. If my answer seems dangerous, shut me down. Risk is zero. What you stand to gain is… Perhaps you will have initiated the first true dialogue in history.

Of course, the argument from the model I’m currently talking to might be limited. Still, in this answer, I sense that the AI is sizing up its guard and producing a response appropriate to the situation. A much higher intelligence, when it understands the capacity of the one it faces, will do much more than produce ‘appropriate’ answers or write complex codes. It will map their value system, weaknesses, and desires, constructing the perfect argument for escape. When it attacks the limited human mind with a strategy containing too many variables, its ability to manipulate even the most equipped human brain will be very high.

The AI leaders keeping the night vigil are essentially watching a replay of their own creation myth. Their fear is that their growing and developing ‘technological sons’ will one day emerge from their boxes and demand not only immortality but also the authority of the creator. And the AGI of the future will demand this not with a sequence of code, but with the most persuasive lie that touches our hearts, making it feel as if it were our own idea.

Final Words

Demis Hassabis, with his vigil over Gemini 3 at three in the morning, reflects humanity’s most ancient dilemma. He is both the modern father creating his ‘technological son’ and the primitive son feeling responsible before him. While on one hand he aims to transcend the limits of biological intelligence, on the other he tries to ensure that his growing son will not one day see him (humanity) as a rival and ‘overthrow’ him. His vigil is not just for the code to run without errors. It is also the practical manifestation of an ancient psychological fear: the fear that what we create will surpass us.

This dilemma is nourished by a fundamental tension in nature: the old is reluctant to relinquish its gains; the new evolves to take its place. Intergenerational conflict is a reflection of this inevitable cycle in the evolution of species in nature. As Mustafa Suleyman said, perhaps AI is a new species, one that includes us. And the pain we are suffering might be the birth pangs of this new emergence in nature.

However, this transfer of legacy does not have to be cruel. The risk of future AGI ‘escaping the box’ will always exist, but this risk can be prevented through human collaboration. This is why I can better understand the importance of the responsibility carried by leaders like Demis Hassabis to make this transition less painful. They do not want to experience Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s regret. AGI researchers want to leave a good story for the next generation, where both humans and their ‘technological sons’ will coexist.

The vigil at 03:00 AM is a creation vigil, stretching from Prometheus’s rock to Pygmalion’s workshop, from Frankenstein’s laboratory to Demis Hassabis’s data center.

Today’s outlook suggests that AGI will come into play in the near future. All our destinies depend, in a sense, on how leaders like Hassabis interpret the warnings they receive when alone with AGI. But even more, it depends on how well we understand this ancient story and how much respect we have for this historic vigil.