It’s assumed it was electricity that Frankenstein used to bring his monster to life. Makes sense, the public was fascinated by tricks like making dead frogs’ legs twitch when given a jolt. The implication being that electricity could give the spark of life, bring back from the dead.

Electricity was always considered a curiosity. Only with the Enlightenment did it become a science, but it took almost a century to switch on a light.

The work of Luigi Galvani, who was the origin of the trick with the frogs’ legs, was omnipresent in the imaginations of the upper classes of which Mary Shelley was a member. The Frankenstein story is a “what if” — what if we could create life from a spark.

Artificial Intelligence is like that. For the longest time, there was no way to conjure up even the slightest intelligence from the cathode tubes that powered 50’s computers. Whatever Turing might have insinuated with his test, we were never fooled for long.

But there was entertainment. Science fiction writers were high on the notion of super-intelligent machines that would rule us all.

There is a huge gap between a science and the engineering prowess to bring that science to industry. Electricity needed the inventions of the First Industrial Revolution and a complex infrastructure of small industries to turn it from a curiosity into an essential tool.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and others, delivered the mental model for the development of the engineering that drove electricity to mainstream. For AI, science fiction did the same: enthused millions to pursue computer science, build the internet, then AI.

But, if entertainment comes first and industry second, where is AI in that process? Frankenstein was written in 1818, by that time the basic concepts of electricity were well established. Yet it took another 80 years to Edison, more than a century to reach homes and light the dark city streets. Only in the last couple of decades have we developed batteries efficient enough to replace polluting cars with EV’s.

And yes, developments follow each other up faster in our time, but it took decades from the cathode tube to the microprocessor, and more decades to develop the energy-hungry data centres for our inefficient AI.

Is AI is still in the entertainment stage? I think so. Called “intelligence”, but those using it realise that it’s far from that. Indeed, a new term has come into fashion: Artificial GENERAL Intelligence, as we realised that stringing words together does not constitute real intelligence, just like the twitch of dead muscle does not constitute life.

AI is great for marketing texts, cool images, high school essays. And for the entertainment industry.

Looking at how long it took for electricity to be as enveloping as it is, I think we still have a long way to go before we can create the infrastructure needed for something like AGI. But what we have already done is to create it in the minds eye of the billions of educated humans. I’m sure we’ll get there.