HOLLYWOOD has made at least half a dozen films based on Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece—mindless travesties all of them, even the Kenneth Branagh version released in 1994. That is a pity because the parable of the Genevan protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, deserves wider appreciation, especially among those concerned about technology getting out of control.

In the actual story, there is no crazed assistant, no criminal brain stolen from a grave, no violent rampage, and no angry mob hunting down and killing the monster. Instead, the rejected creation pleads to be accepted, and cared for, by its creator and tries hard to fit in with society. Yes, there is violence and revenge—it wouldn't be a gothic novel without them. In the end, however, the autonomous being departs to commit suicide after its creator dies of disease.

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Out of control?

What makes the tale such an enduring classic are the moral questions it raises about creation, responsibility and unintended consequences. The lessons are as relevant in today's world of autonomous technology—whether driverless vehicles or surgical robots—as they were in 1818 when the melodrama first scared the daylights out of Georgian England.

Whether consciously or not, the Royal Academy of Engineering in Britain seems lately to have taken Shelley's fable to heart. In a report published last week, the academy urges opinion-formers to start thinking seriously about the implications of autonomous technology—machinery that can act independently by replicating human behaviour. The intention is to have such machines do the sort of jobs people find dull, dirty or dangerous. Many such systems either already exist or are closer to reality than is generally realised. And right now, the ethical, let alone the legal, framework for dealing with any untoward consequences of their actions simply does not exist.

The academy looked at two areas of the technology that are expanding fast: autonomous transport and automated help around the home for the elderly. Within ten years, driverless vehicles that use lasers and radars to sense their surroundings will be able to thread their way through traffic. They are already widespread in controlled environments such as warehouses, airports and mines. Whether they will be seen on the public highways is not a technological issue, but a political and legal matter.

With their digital controllers programmed to obey the highway code, driverless trucks will be far safer and more predictable than human-operated vehicles. They won't suddenly pull out in front of you, or refuse to give way when they should. But if a mechanical failure or software glitch should ever cause a driverless truck to collide with a car, who would be legally responsible—the truck company, the manufacturer, the systems engineer? (Under today's product-liability law, the motorist would doubtless get off scot-free, even if the accident was his fault.)

There are similar concerns about automatons designed to watch over the elderly. Systems exist to check when people are awake, whether they have taken their medication, and what their vital signs are. Privacy issues aside, such aids are to be welcomed for their greater good.

But once sensor data can be used to tell people with dementia what to do and what not to do, the potential for abuse can become real. The benefits of such patient-monitoring in the home may be that the individual wanders around less, suffers less incontinence and sleeps better. But can even the most responsible of families and carers be trusted to supervise such technology day in and day out for years on end, to stop accidents happening? The answer may be not more technology, but better social engineering. For sure, people have barely begun to think about such issues.

In 2006, a survey by Elon University and the Pew Internet Project in America asked some 742 technology experts and social critics whether autonomous machines would leave humans out of the loop. Slightly over half thought people would not lose control, but not all that many fewer felt they might.

Respondents were invited to give their views. A recurring theme was that “technology beyond our control” was rather alarmist. The history of applying automation to human tasks (telephone operators, for instance) had not left people unduly at the mercy of autonomous contraptions. Defying Shelley's prognostication, many respondents felt few technologies live beyond the control of their creators: everything has a “choke point” of one sort or another—built in, often subconsciously, for reasons of convenience, safety or mistake.

That was three years ago, when few were probably aware of how quickly a technology known as “evolvable hardware” was emerging from the shadows. Like the “brute-force” methods standard in code-cracking and computer chess, evolvable machines try billions of different possibilities. But the difference is that they continually crop and refine their trial-and-error solutions—mimicking the way natural selection works in the wild.

How soon before evolvable machines become cleverer than people? Little over a decade is the current consensus. One such machine has already been awarded a patent for something it quietly invented on its own.

The temptation to surrender control to machines that are smarter, more vigilant and less prone to boredom, irritation and emotional outbursts than people will be overwhelming. People will do so for reasons of comfort, convenience, safety and cost. So, what happens when a one-in-a-billion bug causes the software to crash, or the safety valves are not operated properly?

That is what happened at Three Mile Island in 1979. Though the nuclear power station was not an autonomous system, it was running automatically with its human controllers outside the loop. When things went horribly wrong, inexperienced operators tried desperately to take command, only to make one compounding mistake after another—turning a control system with good negative feedback into a positive, runaway disaster.

Though now dated, Langdon Winner's oft-cited book “Autonomous Technology” (MIT Press, 1977) was one of the first to call attention to the way the complexity of big systems can lead to loss of control and disaster. That was two years before the explosion at Three Mile Island.

Dr Winner was also one of the first to note that Frankenstein's invention represented a giant leap in the capability of a certain kind of technology. Yet, it was sent it out into the world with no concern for how best to include it in the community. When the creature returned as an autonomous force with demands that it insisted were met, its creator was unable to find a way to repair the damage done by his imperfect invention. Shelley's story may have been the first to show how good intentions behind technological inventions can go awry. It surely won't be the last.