Jurassic Park Is A Warning About AI
By: Davor Mondom
This September, I read Jurassic Park for the first time. I don’t know what took me so long — I remember buying a paperback copy when I was a teenager, but I never got around to reading it and at some point I got rid of it. Earlier in the year, my wife and I rewatched the original trilogy of movies to prepare for Jurassic World: Dominion. With dinosaurs on my brain, I resolved that this year I would finally read the book that started it all.
I’m glad I waited.
“Biotechnology promises the greatest revolution in human history,” proclaims the introduction to Michael Crichton’s 1990 bestseller. Thirty-five years later, a different technology is making that same claim: AI. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft are pouring billions of dollars into a plethora of AI tools — ChatGPT, Midjourney, Gemini, Copilot, to name a few — that promise to transform everything from work to dating.
Compared to the 1993 film on which it’s based, Jurassic Park the book delves in greater detail into the scientific and philosophical implications of InGen’s experiment on Isla Nublar. The more I read, the more I couldn’t help but think about the AI boom in which we currently find ourselves.
Jurassic Park presents a cautionary tale that should make us wary of today’s AI evangelism. Like our AI titans, InGen developed a supposedly game-changing technology that, on closer inspection, wasn’t quite what it was sold to be. And just like the many schools, businesses, and government agencies that have rushed to embrace AI, InGen immediately sought to capitalize on its discovery by building a dinosaur theme park, moving so fast that it overlooked — and ignored — potential dangers.
Through a combination of arrogance and ignorance, Jurassic Park failed in spectacular — and deadly — fashion. Thankfully, the park was never open to the public. We, however, may not be so lucky. AI is already eliminating jobs, straining natural resources, and, most disturbingly, killing people. By the time the costs of AI become obvious to enough people, the damage may already be done.
As many people have pointed out, book John Hammond is different from movie John Hammond. Richard Attenborough’s Hammond comes across as a wide-eyed eccentric grandpa, while book Hammond is the sort of cutthroat and — frankly — asshole who would be comfortable in a room with the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Travis Kalanick.
They are both, however, salesmen. Hammond invites three scientists — paleontologist Alan Grant, paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, and mathematician Ian Malcolm — to Isla Nublar, an island near Costa Rica owned by his company, InGen. There, he makes a startling revelation: through the wonders of biotechnology, InGen has created living, breathing dinosaurs.
Except, it turns out, they haven’t. Not exactly.
On a tour of InGen’s labs, Dr. Henry Wu, InGen’s chief scientist, explains that the company extracted dinosaur DNA from blood-sucking insects trapped in amber. Most of the time, however, this DNA was incomplete. In those cases, InGen inserted segments of DNA from other organisms to complete the sequence. InGen’s dinosaurs are manipulated in other ways. To ensure that they won’t breed, all the dinosaurs are sterilized and born female. Furthermore, their genes are altered so that they can’t produce lysine, creating a kind of kill switch that ensures that the dinosaurs can’t survive off Isla Nublar. InGen’s dinosaurs, then, are quite different from those that walked the Earth 65 million years ago. In Jurassic Park III, Grant dismisses the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park as “genetically engineered theme park monsters.”
Though tools like ChatGPT are popularly called “AI,” they are a far cry from Skynet or Hal. ChatGPT, Copilot, and like are examples of generative AI, a form of artificial intelligence that generates an output by studying a corpus of inputs. ChatGPT can write a letter of recommendation only because its algorithm has been trained on a dataset that includes countless letters of recommendation from all across the Internet. Cambridge researcher Harry Law has therefore declared that “generative ‘AI ’is neither artificial nor intelligent.” (The holy grail of the AI industry is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is more akin to a thinking machine, though whether AGI is even possible is unclear.)
Having discovered a way to bring dinosaurs back from extinction, InGen moved quickly to cash in. When Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm arrived on Isla Nublar, InGen was a year away from opening Jurassic Park. Before the first visitors had even walked through the gates, John Hammond was already envisioning his empire. In the book, he tells Wu that InGen had already acquired land for Jurassic Parks in Europe and Japan and that construction would start within a year — both would be open in four years’ time. Hammond further predicted that between park revenue, merchandising, and media, InGen would be earning $20 billion a year.
None of that came to pass, of course. InGen’s genetic safeguards proved illusory. In the book, a colony of Procompsognathus ends up in Costa Rica, where they attack locals. They survived off Isla Nublar because, as it turned out, the dinosaurs were able to obtain adequate lysine from natural foods instead of relying on InGen supplements. The X-ray irradiation used to sterilize the dinosaurs was unreliable, and, most crucially, the use of frog DNA to fill in missing dinosaur DNA resulted in dinosaurs that could change their biological sex. The dinosaurs could, in fact, mate.
Jurassic Park failed because InGen was in over its head, rushing to make a quick buck off of forces that it didn’t understand. In the book, Ian Malcolm accuses Henry Wu and the other park engineers of having “thintelligence”: “They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences.”
The rapid embrace of AI is a triumph of thintelligence. A lot of money is going into AI right now — according to the New York Times, companies will spend half a trillion dollars on AI in 2026 alone. All that money supports not just the development of tools, but also the construction of infrastructure to support AI, such as data centers. But even that number is paltry in light of the investment firm Brookfield’s estimate that meeting AI demand will need $7 trillion in investment over the next ten years. At the same time that AI cheating is rampant, many colleges and universities are making AI tools available to faculty, students, and staff. (See examples here and here and here.)
AI has also contributed to layoffs across many industries, including technology, finance, and media, as companies look to maximize the bottom line by replacing humans with bots. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple are integrating AI into their products and services, making AI that much harder to avoid. A March 2025 survey from Elon University found that 52% of American adults use AI tools like ChatGPT.
Like John Hammond salivating over the $20 billion a year he would earn from his Jurassic Parks, we are collectively buying into the AI hype without truly appreciating the consequences. The massive energy needs of AI data centers are raising electric bills for ordinary consumers and pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, worsening our climate crisis. AI data centers also use a lot of water to keep their hardware cool, taxing the water supply in places like California. AI “hallucinations” — whereby a tool like ChatGPT will invent incorrect information — are a well documented problem that has had significant repercussions for users. In 2024, a Massachusetts lawyer was sanctioned because they submitted AI-generated court documents that referenced fake cases, and they were not alone. There have also been disturbing cases of generative AI tools encouraging users to commit suicide, even providing instruction on how to do so. On a less alarming but still troubling note, AI may also be exacerbating loneliness and impeding friendships. AI-generated deepfakes have unleashed a new age of frauds and scams and been used to manipulate voters.
The fact that generative AI tools train on human-made content has also raised concerns over copyright infringement and led to major lawsuits against AI companies. AI companies insist that their use of copyrighted material constitutes fair use, and some courts have agreed.
In the book, Ian Malcolm delivers a stirring condemnation of InGen’s hubris that has a lot of relevance today (I quote only a portion here, but it’s worth reading in full)
Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power…But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step…There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy…And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly. You don’t even know exactly what you have done, but already you have reported it, patented it, and sold it.
When OpenAI launched the latest version of Sora in September, the company required copyright holders to opt out if they didn’t want their material used by the tool. Copyrighted material is the lifeblood of generative AI — the companies argue as much. But rather than compensate
creators fairly, AI companies are looking for legal loopholes and putting the onus on copyright holders to ensure their material isn’t scraped. InGen would be proud.
Citing chaos theory, Ian Malcolm believed that Jurassic Park was doomed to fail. There are some signs that the AI boom may be an AI bubble. AI companies will need $2 trillion in revenue by 2030 to keep pace with all the investing, according to one estimate. An MIT study found that 95%
of companies that have integrated AI into their workflows have seen no return on investment. Many companies that rushed to replace humans with AI are having second thoughts, and some are even rehiring workers that they previously fired. Pew found that more Americans are growing concerned about AI’s negative impacts. If AI is a bubble, its bursting may make Jurassic Park look quaint — by one reckoning, there’s far more money in AI right now than in either the dot-com or subprime mortgage bubbles.
In the book, Malcolm argues that experiments like Jurassic Park mark “the end of the scientific era.” “Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating,” he says. “But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live.”4 Whether the promise of AI pans out remains to be seen. But it is already raising questions about what it means to be human, whether AI “art” is really art, whether you can cheat on your partner with a chatbot, and more. Science has forced us to ask these questions, but it cannot
answer them for us.
Jurassic Park is a story about the abuse of science in the name of profit and progress, one whose lessons we would do well to heed in the age of artificial intelligence. When John Hammond worries that dinosaurs escaping Isla Nublar will destroy the world, Ian Malcolm dismisses him —
Earth is a lot tougher than it looks. Similarly, for all its environmental impacts, AI will not destroy the world. But it could transform human civilization in ways we don’t like, leaving us less creative, more isolated, more stratified, and more distrustful.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We have the power to say ‘no.’ That is the moral of Jurassic Park.
Davor was born in Bosnia. He and his parents came to the United States as refugees following the civil war in the 1990s. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University. He currently lives in Syracuse with his wife Meg and their Siberian husky, Izzie. Davor can be found on Bluesky @dmondom.bsky.social.