Here is the prompt I gave to Claude AI:
Write a discussion between Mary Shelley and Jules Verne on how advancements in science and technology in the future will affect people and how people will use these advancements. Part of this should focus on whether or not we should be optimistic or pessimistic. Will science and technology make us better off or worse off?
The image is from Google Gemini.
They never met in life — she died in 1851, when he was twenty-three and unpublished. What follows imagines them meeting somewhere outside of time, in a room lined with unfinished manuscripts, to argue about the centuries neither of them would live to see.
MARY SHELLEY: You have the look of a man who has just come from watching a rocket leave the earth.
JULES VERNE: I have been imagining one, which is nearly the same thing. Madame Shelley — I have read your Frankenstein three times now, and each time I finish it more troubled than the last. You gave the modern age its ghost story before the age had properly begun.
SHELLEY: It was never meant as a ghost story. It was meant as a warning about fathers who will not stay to raise what they have made.
JULES VERNE: And yet I confess I cannot share your gloom about it. My whole life's work has been the opposite wager — that the submarine, the balloon, the cannon that fires a man to the moon, these are the instruments of wonder, not horror. Nemo is bitter, yes, but the Nautilus itself is a cathedral of human ingenuity. I wanted boys reading by lamplight to believe the world was still worth exploring.
SHELLEY: I never doubted the world was worth exploring. I doubted whether the explorer would take responsibility for what he found — or what he built. Victor does not fail because he creates. He fails because the moment his creature opens its eyes, he is disgusted by it and flees. Every horror in my book follows from that abandonment, not from the electricity or the galvanism itself.
JULES VERNE: So your quarrel was never truly with science.
SHELLEY: No. My quarrel was with the vanity that mistakes making something for the whole of the labor. A man who invents a marvel and then will not live with its consequences has only done half of his work — the easy half.
JULES VERNE: That, I can agree to. Though I suspect the centuries ahead will test that principle more severely than either of us can picture. I have tried to imagine machines that speak across oceans in an instant, carriages that need no horse, medicines that turn plagues into memories. I believe these things are coming, and I believe on the whole they will be a mercy to ordinary people — fewer children buried before the age of five, fewer villages destroyed by a season's poor harvest.
SHELLEY: I do not doubt the mercy in it. I lost three of my own four children before they could walk or speak, Monsieur Verne. If some future physician's instrument could have saved even one, I would forgive that instrument almost any sin committed by its cousins.
JULES VERNE: (quietly) I did not know that.
SHELLEY: Most people don't ask. They would rather discuss the monster than the mother who wrote him. But it is precisely because I want those cures that I distrust the men who will build them without asking what else they are building alongside. A society that learns to defeat death in the sickbed may not pause to ask whether it should also learn to deal it more efficiently on the battlefield. The same curiosity drives both hands.
JULES VERNE: You are thinking of my Begum's Fortune — the peaceful city and the armored one, built side by side by two rival heirs, one devoted to healing his people and the other to arming a cannon that could flatten a mountain. I did not write that book as a young man full of blind faith in machinery. I wrote it because I had already begun to see where unrestrained industry might lead a nation that forgot to ask why it was building.
SHELLEY: Then we are not so far apart as your Nemo and my Victor would suggest.
JULES VERNE: Perhaps the difference is only where we choose to stand at the end of the story. You leave your creature on the ice, alone, having destroyed everyone who might have loved him, because no one taught him how to be received into the world. I leave my captains and inventors having seen the wonder of the deep sea or the center of the earth, forever changed by having witnessed it, even when the voyage costs them everything. I want the reader to feel that the going-out was worth the danger.
SHELLEY: And I want the reader to feel the weight of what is owed to what we bring into being — child, invention, discovery, it hardly matters which. The debt is the same.
JULES VERNE: Then let us speak plainly of what is coming, since we are neither of us bound anymore by what we lived to see. Say there are, a century or two hence, machines that can hold a conversation nearly as a person would. Machines that fly without wings flapping, that carry the sick through the air to be healed a thousand miles from where they fell ill, that let a farmer in the Auvergne speak face to face with his son on the other side of the world. Do you tell me humanity is worse for having built such things?
SHELLEY: I tell you humanity will be exactly as good or as wicked with those things as it was without them — only faster, and at a greater scale. A father who is patient and attentive will use a machine that speaks like a person to teach his daughter kindly. A father who is careless will use the very same machine to avoid ever speaking to her himself. The tool does not supply the virtue. It only removes the excuse of incapacity. What remains exposed, once the excuse is gone, is character.
JULES VERNE: That is a harder doctrine than mine. I would like to believe the wonder itself instructs us — that a man who has stood at the bottom of the sea, who has seen what Nemo saw, cannot come back entirely the same small creature he was.
SHELLEY: Wonder can instruct. It can also simply astonish, and pass, and leave the astonished man precisely as selfish as before, only better armed. I do not say this to rob you of your optimism, Monsieur Verne. I say it because I think your optimism is more useful than my caution only if it is paired with it. A world of engineers who believe entirely in the goodness of their inventions is nearly as dangerous as a world of engineers who believe in nothing at all.
JULES VERNE: Then tell me honestly — when you look toward the centuries we will not see, do you fear them more than you hope for them?
SHELLEY: (after a silence) No. I think I would tell any future reader this: do not ask whether science will make you better or worse off, as though the answer were fixed in the steel and the wires. Ask instead whether the people building it, and the people governing it, and the people simply living alongside it, are willing to take responsibility for it after the moment of creation has passed — after the applause has died down and the thing must simply be lived with. Every age gets the monster or the miracle it deserves, depending on whether it stays in the laboratory long enough to raise what it has made.
JULES VERNE: And I think I would tell that same reader — go and look anyway. Build the Nautilus. Send the cannon to the moon, though I hope by then you will have found a gentler method of arrival. Do not let my colleague's caution curdle into a fear of the horizon itself. The world will be transformed whether you look at it bravely or with your eyes shut; better that you should be the one who chose to look.
SHELLEY: On that, Monsieur Verne, I find I have no argument left to give you. Look, by all means. I only ask that you not look away again once you do.
JULES VERNE: A fair bargain. Shall we shake on it, ghost to ghost?
SHELLEY: (a small, real smile) We shall.
Neither of them, in the end, calls it settled — and perhaps that is the most honest place to leave it. Shelley's caution and Verne's wonder were never really opposites; they were the two hands required to build anything worth building.
