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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

#41

Post by TrackerFF »

Wouldn't surprise me if the rise of AI leads to some sort of Khmer Rouge / Cambodia-lite type of situation, where anti-technology and anti-intellectualism will grow.

Right now the message is more or less: If you want to "AI-proof" yourself, pick up a trade or manual job.

If we create a society where all the peons will work in healthcare / trades / manual labor, while the trillionaires control all their other aspects of (digital) life, that could very well usher in reactionary leaders.

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

#42

Post by Cthulhu_ »

PMunch wrote: post #36
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…

It'll have flight stabilization and controls and the like, but those things predate and / or do not need AI; AI algorithms are too expensive and slow for realtime flight control things. Some of those were traditionally done mechanically, even.

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

#43

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #21

He was also warning against the followers, myths, institutions, and power structures that turn a talented person into an untouchable savior. Sounds familiar?

Sounds like Warhammer 40K where the God-Emperor was like "I am not the Messiah!" and everyone's like "He IS the Messiah!" but then perhaps his intent was to be worshiped as a god all along. 4d chess etc.

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

#44

Post by inglor_cz »

TrackerFF wrote: post #41

Wouldn't surprise me if the rise of AI leads to some sort of Khmer Rouge / Cambodia-lite type of situation, where anti-technology and anti-intellectualism will grow. Right now the message is more or less: If you want to "AI-proof" yourself, pick up a trade or manual job. If we create a society where all the peons will work in healthcare / trades / manual labor, while the trillionaires control all their other aspects…

I'd expect violent anti-technology rebels to be easily defeated by AI-powered drones, though.

Much like the traditional Samurai of Japan got crushed [0] by a new model peasant army of the Meiji Emperor, which adapted European guns, artillery and drill and basically exterminated them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satsuma_Rebellion

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

#45

Post by endymion-light »

ainch wrote: post #26
endymion-light wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we've been using technology to solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to do for years. Is Deep Blue sentient because it can beat any human at chess?

Deep Blue's strength was leveraging massive compute to execute a task-specific, human-written algorithm. The problems which LLMs are tackling don't elude mathematicians because they require too much number-crunching, but because they demand creative problem solving. The latter seems more profound, even if it doesn't imply sentience.

Not to get too reductive - but LLMs are essentially performing massive number-crunching at a textual representation level. If you've ever played around with early NLP models, they can give you some astounding results for aspects like sentiment analysis that would seem like creative problem solving to someone in 1950. You could say the same for using a neural network to perform things like object recognition.

That's not removing the amazing ability of LLMs and the scale of this accomplishment, don't get me wrong - it's incredibly impressive that specialised models are now able to walk down pathways for creative problem solving - but I don't think that suggests a sentience or profoundness - rather it's just number-crunching at a astronomically larger scale.

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

#46

Post by fxj »

khafra wrote: post #13
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.

When "guess with some magic" can solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to, it seems fair to ask whether it's approaching risky levels of intelligence.

[dead]

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

#47

Post by officialchicken »

vintermann wrote: post #37
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.

Totally agree with all the above: the jihad + OCB's role (IMO) is great author's device for setting up the scattering and evolution of the Honored Matres (chaotic evil) - where the potent mix of religion and gene manipulation become the key instruments of control by fear and seduction.

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

#48

Post by retox »

TrackerFF wrote: post #41

Wouldn't surprise me if the rise of AI leads to some sort of Khmer Rouge / Cambodia-lite type of situation, where anti-technology and anti-intellectualism will grow. Right now the message is more or less: If you want to "AI-proof" yourself, pick up a trade or manual job. If we create a society where all the peons will work in healthcare / trades / manual labor, while the trillionaires control all their other aspects…

[dead]

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

#49

Post by netsharc »

keiferski wrote: post #12
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.

Man it annoys me to no end that this basic fact is so under discussed. It’s as if calling something AI is all that’s needed to justify it being the same thing as Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI. The ultimate fact is that LLMs are a pretty powerful technology that has little to nothing to do with most fictional depictions of intelligent machines.…

Yesterday's plane making a turnaround because of a Bluetooth speaker with the name "bomb" (media says "a 4 letter word") makes me think the Skynet-level destruction is a risk, because humans are already too chicken-shit to take responsibility for decisions. They'd rather feel safe by just following the procedure, however stupid it is. And in the the future the procudre might be "Do whatever the AI says".

My thought about the turnaround: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343390

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

#50

Post by drivingmenuts »

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?

It is difficult to seriously consider the opinion of someone who clearly fails to understand the difference between denotative and connotative meaning.
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