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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

#71

Post by willis936 »

thih9 wrote: post #35
willis936 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes but I am throwing this one out because technocrat has a very specific meaning that has never experienced a period of irrelevance while it has been in use. Plutocracy has its own word and displacing the concept of technocracy with a worse concept is something I will call out every single time.

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

#72

Post by sometimelurker »

defrost wrote: post #54
GeoAtreides wrote: post #53

>the Bene Gesserit sisterhood with their powers of prescience no, the Bene Gesserit doesn't have prescience, the opposite maybe (postcognition) >Spice melange, which can only be found on the planet Arrakis (aka Dune), is the drug that enables this enhanced mental cognition no, for anyone not called Atreides spice just prolongs life; some mentats take sapho juice, but they don't need drugs. .

As I recall, perhaps erroneously, Guild Navigators are nominal humans who owe their ability to move ships to being spiced to their gills.

I think the navigators were also gmo'ed a bit

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

#73

Post by insane_dreamer »

I believe that at some point we are going to see a very serious public backlash to AI -- not because of the technology itself, but because of the way it is and will be used by large corporations to suck the life out of middle income earners, and used by governments to exert more control and suppress dissent (see China's use of AI to predict who might be likely to rebel; you can be sure the NSA is not far behind).

The last time there was serious public demonstrations against a technology was the anti-nuclear demonstrations in the 60s/70s when people were rightfully afraid that we had created something capable of destroying us all. The movements petered out, but it did force things like SALT, more aggressive IAEA to prevent proliferation, etc.

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

#74

Post by Jach »

The Dune series doesn't stop with the first novel, I encourage all who liked the first one to continue reading up through at least God Emperor of Dune. Something the usually ironic calls for a Butlerian Jihad against modern LLMs miss is that even in the Dune universe, it just traded one form of stagnation and tyranny for another, it didn't really improve things. It delayed the threat of human extinction from a race of sentient machines, but such a future is inevitable without the Golden Path, and over the entire time groups like the Ixians were still developing technology to skirt the line.

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

#75

Post by bodegajed »

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…

You can ban the math by limiting the energy and the material resources.

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

#76

Post by defrost »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #61
defrost wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall, perhaps erroneously, Guild Navigators are nominal humans who owe their ability to move ships to being spiced to their gills.

Yes, I forgot about the Guild Navigators. Technically they don't move the ships, they see the safe path to the destination.

I haven't read the book since I was 13 / 14 (ish) and that was some decades ago and not so long after it was first published, by my recollection there was a strong parallel between Spice (must flow) and Oil in a not so subtle way.

Via the Navigators, who lived in dense clouds of spice, transport across the Dune universe was possible - spice was as fundamental to trade and commerce as oil has been here on earth for the past century.

If that recollection was correct, it seems odd to overlook one of the key layers of the original work (as I recall it, of course).

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

#77

Post by Schlagbohrer »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #53

>the Bene Gesserit sisterhood with their powers of prescience no, the Bene Gesserit doesn't have prescience, the opposite maybe (postcognition) >Spice melange, which can only be found on the planet Arrakis (aka Dune), is the drug that enables this enhanced mental cognition no, for anyone not called Atreides spice just prolongs life; some mentats take sapho juice, but they don't need drugs. .

The Bene Gesserit do have prescience, what are you talking about? It's why the god emperor later tries to breed humans who's actions cannot be foreseen and can therefore escape the oppression of the future-seeing Bene Gesserit.

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

#78

Post by Schlagbohrer »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #68

If you want to base your core beliefs on sci-fi books at least read a little more than Dune. Go read some books from The Culture, better series than the Dune.

Excellent counter example, since The Culture books portray a utopia made possible by truly benevolent AI overlords.

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

#79

Post by Schlagbohrer »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #73

I believe that at some point we are going to see a very serious public backlash to AI -- not because of the technology itself, but because of the way it is and will be used by large corporations to suck the life out of middle income earners, and used by governments to exert more control and suppress dissent (see China's use of AI to predict who might be likely to rebel; you can be sure the NSA is not far behind). The…

This is the classic issue of creating newer, better, more advanced technology and science within a broken social / economic system. Feeding better tools into a broken society just makes things worse. Giving dictators better ways to spy on and dominate their population (and to wage war) just worsens those things, even though that same technology and science in an already-existing utopian society could have been used to improve life on Earth for everyone.
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