Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” in 1818, when she was twenty. The novel tells of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who assembles and animates a living creature, then recoils from it in horror and abandons it. The rejected creature, intelligent and articulate but treated as a monster, turns on its creator and destroys everything he loves.
The book is not about artificial intelligence in any technical sense, but it set the template that fiction about machine minds would reuse for the next two centuries: a human builds something in his own image, fails to take responsibility for it, and is destroyed by the thing he made. The subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” names the pattern - the human who steals fire from the gods and is punished for overreaching.
Modern commentary on AI risk regularly invokes “Frankenstein” as shorthand for the danger of building powerful systems without controlling them. The full text has been freely available on Project Gutenberg since 1993; it remains in the public domain.
Why business readers should care: the cultural reflex that a created intelligence will inevitably turn on its maker is older than computing itself, and it shapes how the public, regulators, and your own staff react to any AI you deploy. The anxiety predates the technology by 130 years.