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Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

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Re: Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

#4

Post by orbital-decay »

Of course the article mixes things up in order to push a cheap narrative. Herbert's Butlerian Jihad was a rehash of Islamic ban on images of people that is supposed to prevent idolatry and preserve uniqueness of God. It's purely religious in nature and has nothing to do with "tools of oppression". Not to mention that absolutely any automation, even the simplest kind, was considered a thinking machine and was banned, not just that arbitrary range of things called AI.

Re: Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

#7

Post by kombookcha »

orbital-decay wrote: post #4

Of course the article mixes things up in order to push a cheap narrative. Herbert's Butlerian Jihad was a rehash of Islamic ban on images of people that is supposed to prevent idolatry and preserve uniqueness of God. It's purely religious in nature and has nothing to do with "tools of oppression". Not to mention that absolutely any automation, even the simplest kind, was considered a thinking machine and was banned,…

This is a flattening of Herbert's angle - it is explicitly stated in the quoted section in the article that part of the reason for the ban is that the people who control thinking machines would exert outsized control on those who depend on them. This is a recurring theme in Dune, as we see with anxieties about dependency on mentats and Bene Gesserit truthsayers (the latter of which are in fact exerting hidden influence from their positions of trust).

Suk doctors are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune.

(Edit: Suk Doctors get imperial conditioning, not mentats)

Re: Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

#8

Post by tomaytotomato »

LLMs cannot think, they just guess with some magic with the help of things like softmax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_function), that makes it seem intelligent.

We aren't enslaved or at any risk just yet with this form of "thinking machine", but we do need to culutrally and emotionally come to terms with them.

Let's not have any other "jihad" just yet, there's plenty of other jihads going on right now.

Re: Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

#9

Post by angelmanuel »

orbital-decay wrote: post #4

Of course the article mixes things up in order to push a cheap narrative. Herbert's Butlerian Jihad was a rehash of Islamic ban on images of people that is supposed to prevent idolatry and preserve uniqueness of God. It's purely religious in nature and has nothing to do with "tools of oppression". Not to mention that absolutely any automation, even the simplest kind, was considered a thinking machine and was banned,…

The tools of oppression reading is backed directly by the books: "But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"

Is it also true that Fremen are canonically descendants of Zensunni practitioners, which is a mix of Zen and Sunni Islam

Many other restrict machines, and the dogma is encoded on a religious text called the Orange Catholic Bible. And, this might be a big jump but, some of the specific anti-machine quotes are similar to Matthew 12:31-32 IMO

Re: Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

#10

Post by thih9 »

tomaytotomato wrote: post #8

LLMs cannot think, they just guess with some magic with the help of things like softmax ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_function ), that makes it seem intelligent. We aren't enslaved or at any risk just yet with this form of "thinking machine", but we do need to culutrally and emotionally come to terms with them. Let's not have any other "jihad" just yet, there's plenty of other jihads going on right now.

Note that the article doesn’t say that AI itself would do the enslavement; on the contrary:

> With the rise of AI came the rise of a technocratic class that created and controlled these machines, leading to oppressive structures over knowledge and the economy.

It also quotes Dune, where it is said more directly:

> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

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