Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by ArcHound » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

Sol- wrote: post #19

Doesn't it seem implausible that in the world of Dune they reached their level of technology without AGI? Perhaps all their tech is pre Butlerian Jihad, but even that seems questionable. Seems like if it was adopted as a policy, there would have to be many gray areas where people pretend that they aren't really using AI - the ship's computer is just a domain specific finetuned version, after all, etc. Additionally, t…

"Who solved the alignment problem for these superhumans?"

The gun, pointed to their head.

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

#32

Post by AndrewDucker » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

Sol- wrote: post #19

Doesn't it seem implausible that in the world of Dune they reached their level of technology without AGI? Perhaps all their tech is pre Butlerian Jihad, but even that seems questionable. Seems like if it was adopted as a policy, there would have to be many gray areas where people pretend that they aren't really using AI - the ship's computer is just a domain specific finetuned version, after all, etc. Additionally, t…

Why are you assuming that some technology can only be discovered by AGI?

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

#33

Post by expedition32 » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

The Chinese government cares a lot about civil unrest. Which is why they are being much more careful with AI. They remember how the CCP came into power.

More concerned about America. Its freedom of speech means that every douchebag billionaire tech bro is allowed to run of their mouth and rile up the proles.

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

#34

Post by ArneCode » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:34 AM UTC

kombookcha wrote: post #15

ArneCode wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, you made me laugh :) I think that most Amish were never used to technology though?

Young Amish typically venture out into wider society for a while to try it out for a while before returning to their community and settling into adulthood. Presumably the Amish returning now will have encountered LLMs or their output in one form or another during their journey. They're supposed to satisfy their curiosity and try a bunch of stuff, so they can make an informed choice about letting it go. https://en.wik…

Ok, that's cool

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

#35

Post by thih9 » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #14

thih9 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really despise when the term technocrat is misused. It has a very specific meaning in politics and is nowhere near "broligarch", "plutocrat from the tech industry", or any of the thousand different, legitimate ways to describe what people sometimes mean when they mistakenly say "technocrat". How can a political opinion be taken seriously when this extremely basic level of literacy on the topic is missing?

Not to "well ackchyually" your "well ackchyually", but language evolves. I guess in a few years we'll consider it just another instance of semantic shift, perhaps with a splash of folk etymology[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology

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

#36

Post by PMunch » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

fxj wrote: post #20

People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done. I bet some govermenst would like to do that for ordinary people. They can ban visible products (chatbots, public APIs, GPAI services), and laws are already targeting those. but you cant ban the math! the same transformer/attention ideas work great as compressors, function approximators, and surrogate models in physics, chemistry…

I believe the Butlerian Jihad caused a ban for "thinking machines" with a tenet of "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." This to me at least points at a ban for things that behave or feel like a human, not on the underlying math. An ornithopter probably has some fancy AI-esque flight stabilization, but it isn't expressed in a human way. The same goes for function approximators and surrogate models, no one would do the things we see people doing with AIs today, letting them talk them into heinous acts or fall in love with them.

That being said I can very much recommend the two Hyperion books for a good look at AI and co-dependence in sci-fi.

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

#37

Post by vintermann » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:54 AM UTC

2d8a875f-39a2-4 wrote: post #17

Much as I liked the books, enjoyed the most recent movies, big fan of Herbert; lining up the Pandora books to reread next. Etc.... people tend to read too much into his world building. Mostly he was just looking for backstory to lightly justify the story he wanted to tell. Pretty much none of the world building holds up to more than a passing scrutiny, and the Butlerian Jihad is no exception. Better to just enjoy the…

Agreed. He didn't have any strong opinions on AI, the idea that AI is the big bad mostly comes from his son's sequels as far as I can tell. Herbert set up the story with computers mostly written out because it's humans who are interesting, and it was humans he wanted to write a story about.

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

#38

Post by archargelod » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

fxj wrote: post #20

People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done. I bet some govermenst would like to do that for ordinary people. They can ban visible products (chatbots, public APIs, GPAI services), and laws are already targeting those. but you cant ban the math! the same transformer/attention ideas work great as compressors, function approximators, and surrogate models in physics, chemistry…

> People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done.

I don't think we're talking about bans. The word Jihad, in Islam means struggle and usually it's accompanied by a religious "war", but not necessarily violent (see below).

> jihad , In Islam, the central doctrine that calls on believers to combat the enemies of their religion. According to the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth, jihad is a duty that may be fulfilled in four ways: by the heart, the tongue, the hand, or the sword. The first way (known in Sufism as the “greater jihad”) involves struggling against evil desires. The ways of the tongue and hand call for verbal defense and right actions. The jihad of the sword involves waging war against enemies of Islam. [0]

Maybe people can't win against machines, but they sure can fight e.g. by refusing to interact with AI online, at their job, vandalizing mass surveilance cameras, etc. etc.

[0] - https://www.britannica.com/summary/jihad

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

#39

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

decimalenough wrote: post #28

Kiro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a very deep justification. Probably the easiest thing to grasp for when thinking "how can I make this religious theme fit the narrative?".

It seems exactly the opposite to me: Herbert didn't want robots etc in Dune, so he came up with a religious figleaf to justify this.

Herbert wrote other books about the dangers of god-like AI, so it wasn't just an "I don't want this."

Dune is very much about systems of power and oppression, the obvious and less obvious forms they take, and the way they transcend and direct individuals. Even when the individuals are almost omnipotent - in theory.

The whole point of Dune is that these systems are human, but have an independent life of their own.

The narrative is about modes of human supremacy, and a jihad against AI isn't just some optional world building, it fits the narrative perfectly.

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

#40

Post by vintermann » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 10:05 AM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #25

kombookcha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 influen…

> The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh Dr Yueh was not a mentat, but a suk doctor who was subject to conditioning. (Which was broken by the Piter de Vries, via the pain amplifiers applied to his wife, Wanna.) Paul himself was being trained to be a mentat, and there were no hints of conditioning there, neither with Paul,…

de Vries was a "twisted mentat" because he was designed by the tleilaxu to be so. I think there were suggestions that Yueh was, too.

That doesn't necessarily mean they were grown in tanks, though, they could just have been "groomed for purpose" in the same way the Tleilaxu's matriarchal counterpart the Bene Gesserit did.

(The Tleilaxu are to me a very obvious stand-in for "patriarchy": there are a few men ruling over a genderless, fluid workforce, and women are literally just birth machines.)