Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

Post by tim333 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:50 PM UTC

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.…

Post by GlibMonkeyDeath » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

GeoAtreides wrote: post #66

GlibMonkeyDeath wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What good are drones, except as weapons of assassination? Can't use them in an conventional war, there are shields. Presumably a drone could get close enough to push a blade through the shield (maybe use a rocket booster or some other advanced "suspensor" tech) at low-ish speed (a knife would have to travel through the shield on the order of a human reaction time, otherwise even knives wouldn't work. That's about 0.…

if it moves slow enough to pass a shield, it moves slow enough to be easily dispatched. And remember, no autonomous behaviour, there has to be human operator. And it's very expensive. It just doesn't scale.