Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
What I find interesting about thinking machines in Dune, is that in a lot of sci-fi the artificial intelligence itself is what decides to destroy humanity. In Dune, humans in charge of the machines (technocrats) are the ones that come close to destroying humanity. The Jihad was a fight against them, as much as it was against the machines themselves.
So, in a way, we're more likely to see the Dune version of "machines taking over the world/universe" than say, Terminator's even though many joke about ChatGPT/Claude being Skynet.
I'm not sure we read the same story. By the time of the inciting incident, the technocrat cyborgs (Titans) have been enslaved by the machine leader, which has no humans in charge of it.
You did, in fact, read a different story. You're thinking of the story told in the books by Brian Herbert and KJA - which were a distinctly pulpier take on the Dune universe than Frank Herbert's.
Those last books were a lot easier reading! I actually enjoyed them, but I'm still suspect about the whole "finding a floppy disc" thing, seeing as they've been so secretive about it.
It's left fairly ambiguous by Frank Herbert's books. The Jihad is implied to have taken place over ten thousand years before the beginning of Dune - it's ancient history to everyone involved*, so it's only natural that the details are a little hazy.
*: except Leto II, and he doesn't say much about it
A lot of long time Dune fans don't consider those books canon when discussing them in the abstract. Frank Herbert had a vision of what the jihad was and what it meant, and its eventual book depiction was fairly base.
Another, more subtle justification for the Butlerian Jihad is also found in Frank Herbert's original novels, specifically Heidegger's thesis that the use of technology trains humans to think like machines. The problem is that machines are deterministic; thus, training people to be machines is self-limiting.
I wonder whether Heidegger would consider the probabilistic nature of LLMs as having a positive effect on human thought.
LLM's are probabilistic but with a very limited range. They are tuned to be predictable enough to serve as a consumer product, so most ideas you get from them will revolve around the same concepts repeatedly.
LLM force humans to think like machines far more than just writing code.
Writing code is a creative activity with large number of degrees of freedom and opportunities to express yourself. Button pushing and approving code changes is a deeply limiting activity that alienates you from your work.
Although LLMs are not deterministic in normal operation (because of the temperature values used) they are still strongly biased in their outputs. Bias in their outputs is literally how they function.
So you get a different type of conformism where people who interact with LLMs a lot are going to be influenced towards the median, as encoded in those token probability look up tables.
The effect is basically the same as what Heidegger and Illich were worried about, and I think we're seeing it happen already everywhere.
A solution(?) is to try to be your true weird authentic self when you act in the world, rather than bending your words and behaviours to the machine and LLM probability shape.
Authentic being (Dasein) is absolutely unpredictable. You cannot live in that state all the time, obviously, we shuttle through life on autopilot but still, we catch glimpses of it now and then when interacting with a human being (or being one:).
And I distinctly feel AI outputs lack some of that variance and unpredictability. The fractal nature of natural things also is not there with AI. It's an eery feeling, akin to the uncanny valley.
I think that any good writing is a reflection of that Dasein and reading AI outputs I am convinced there is no 'soul' in AI yet.
Indeed we are, but it takes very little to train a human being. In fact, several thousand unique ones finished pre training as I typed this comment! That allows for a considerable natural diversity compared to a chatbot.
A human can be biased toward extinction, like all who are living out of connection with the conditions that sustain life and/or no longer living in relationship with land as kin.
It's those humans who would make and justify the use of thinking machines that are biased in the same way without accounting for the bias.
This isn't an extinction path I've seen noted in most circles.
saw a meme graph lately showing the distribution of 3 different sources of a number from 1 to 10. random, human, ai. random is flat of course, human is a hilly landscape with low hills on all odd values above 1, with 7 the highest, ai is all 7.
appreciate the humor in the meme, but I did become curious about what the latest models would actually produce, and interestingly after asking for 10,000 numbers between 1 and 10, the distribution was a hilly landscape with low hills on odd values and 7 the highest...
Ok this fascinating. I happen to have some Heidegger files, and went a-greppin. I'd say he's really talking about "inaminate objectness", as opposed to our human animate subjectness. Reasons:
1. In Science and Reflection, he says that both the 'completely calculated' nature of classical mechanics and the 'statistical character' of quantum mechanics are two representation of an underlying 'objectness of material nature'.
2. In Discourse on Thinking, he's far more concerned with the instrumental, utilitarian nature of machines than literal determinism, a concept he (somewhat confusingly/uniquely) connects to computation/'computational thinking', as opposed to the inherently-human capability for 'meditative thinking'. I personally would say this bit is refuted by LLMs in the end, but because they have intuitive rationality, a capability that seemed impossible to artificially design to the scientists of the time -- not because they involve dice.
3. In What is Thinking?, he gives the closest connection of this dichotomy to one of his better-known main topics, namely [handi]craft as a special subset of work: 'what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.' In this sense machines would be merely manipulating tools, stochastic or otherwise.
4. Overall I get the sense from skimming that lecture that his concern is a little mischaracterized, and in a kind of beautiful way that backs up my "Dune is still about AI" thesis described in a top-level comment somewhere below: his concern is about any society that could build complex machines (a 'technological' one), not the behavioral aspects of the machines themselves. So that concern applies equally to Star Trek (AGI), 1984 (no AGI), and our current post-singularity society (it's complicated/potentially ""just"" guessing).
All of this fits very well into his central thesis, which is continuing the Kantian & Hegelian tradition of examining how humans might be moral, free, and spiritual despite being meat computers of a largely-unknowable nature. In Heideggerland, this is expressed best in dramatic, nigh-unreadable passages like:
Temporality already maintains itself ecstatically within the horizons of its ecstases; and in temporalizing itself, it comes back to those entities which are encountered in the "there".
With Dasein's factical existence, entities within-the-world are already encountered too.
The fact that such entities are discovered along with Dasein's own "there" of existence, is not left to Dasein's discretion.
Only what it discovers and discloses on occasion, in what direction it does so, how and how far it does so—only these are matters for Dasein's freedom, even if always within the limitations of its thrownness.
TL;DR: He'd probably think they're still just machines, and the question isn't really sound in the first place. IMHO!
Bear in mind that the Dune universe relies on heavy plot armor to make it go. Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet, like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. "Spice" is important because it's needed to enhance the mental powers of pilots for interstellar travel. That's a job which probably could be done by a few avionics boxes in a rack.
That's what requires the Butlerian Jihad.
(Or "spice" might be synthesized. In Herbert's day (the 1960s) organic chemistry wasn't up to synthesizing arbitrary small-molecule drugs, but now it is. It's a service you can order on line, even. Biologicals take more work, but that's what genetic engineering is for.)
The "mental powers" in Dune aren't that impressive. Compare, say, the Harry Potter universe. In Dune, mentats can convince people. Bene Gesserit can look up stuff in their genetic past. Some people can multitask. There are apps for that.
Herbert wanted knife fighters to matter in battle. Not going to happen. Militaries teach knife fighting to build aggression and for desperate situations, but nobody's battle plan depends on a knife fight.
Needs too much surprise. Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat. Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets. Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War.
Herbert wrote before a big, modern, desert war.
So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.
I don't see how most of the plot holes/unrealism you identify is connected with the Butlerian Jihad at all. But re "critiquing Dune's idea of future warfare" (shields and knives, ornithopters, etc) you might also be entertained by Bret Devereaux's recent take:
Plot armor refers to important characters being invulnerable. What you're describing is just plot (or "internal logic" that underlays the plot). You might think of it as "contrived plot" but that's generally how scifi works.
Grand fiction requires conflict, suffering, and war, so banning AI is a necessary plot device.
People keep putting the cart before the horse on this one, and the degree to which modern people have been lulled by fiction is quite worrying. Amusing ourselves to death.
Herbert seemed to think that to be human is to be essentially 'open-ended', capable of undiscovered, indeterminate evolution, both personally and as a species.
The "later books" the "prequels" are not written by Frank Herbert, they're written by his son Brian and SF author Kevin J. Anderson. And not like Christopher Tolkien editing his father's notes, but a completely separate series with nothing in common with the original work.
Whenever I read the original novels, I always imagine the jihad to be a fairly benign if not peaceful exercise more akin to a protest than a war. Like if one day people started rolling across the world smashing data centers and laptops.
I was fairly surprised when his son wrote a novel that felt like a generic, bland robots run amok storyline that happened, more or less, because one guy/titan "ruined a good thing" by telling his AI to run in permissionless mode.
this is an interesting interpretation. i always imagined the jihad as being a violent struggle.
the other jihad in the first novel is that of the Fremen, which is described as being unspeakable violent, so I find it hard to imagine these to be different in that regard.
It's an interpretation if you ignore the impacts of feudalism, slavery, and religious war on Dune. The idea that people were able to express freedom of speech during a time described as the enslavement of 99.99% of the human race seems off-kilter.
You got me wondering what the Imperium of Man's official stance is on AI:
The creation of a Silica Animus is also a terrible crime under Imperial Law by the decree of the Emperor of Mankind Himself as stated in the Treaty of Mars which united the ancient Mechanicum of Mars with the Imperium of Terra in 739.M30. Tradition holds that such unholy constructs are inherently evil and a perverted abomination in the sight of the Omnissiah.
Adeptus Mechanicus religious doctrine states that the Machine Spirit of a Silica Animus is a twisted mockery of the soul of a Human, always treacherous and insane.
Ancient texts tell apocryphal stories, shrouded in metaphor, of such murderous and powerful creations during the Age of Technology, and the legions of the "Men of Iron" that served them in the great war against Humanity remembered as the "Cybernetic Revolt."
Don't forget that the Imperium runs on hypocrisy. Large percentages of the Adeptus Mechanicus is breaking their own rules, including working with abominable intelligences. In fact, what they are dealing with in their main factory world in Mars is a supposedly secret abominable intelligence. And it is, in fact, a shard of an alien god that turned other races into synthetic robots. Banned in public, the center of their cult in reality, even if many probably don't understand what in the world they are doing.
So yes, anything that is supposed policy in the Imperium is supposed to be taken with buckets of salt.
Leagues of Votann and their ironkin offer IMO a thoughtful counterbalance:
Whether one is made from meat or metal, kin is kin. Upon their creation Ironkin are fully welcome into their respective Hold by the rest of the Kin.[10]
Ironkin are computationally advanced enough that they have learned to mimic the squats' social behavior
...
Though the purpose of the Ironkin is to support squats in every aspect of their lives, they are neither held in servitude nor treated as lessers. The Ironkin are simply designed to want to be helpful. However, they can only imitate the emotions of the squats, and it is rare, but not unknown, for an Ironkin to possess ambition or seek to become a leader.
WOW it's strange to see my fave rabbit holes on here lol. And props for linking Lexicanum instead of the Wiki That Shall Not Be Named!
Three very quick thoughts:
1. The Votann are remnants of humanity from the time when our Terran super-AIs ('Men of Gold') had built advanced ship-based AIs ('Men of Stone') to enable long-sleep-style interstellar colonization, and the enigmatic "Votann Cores" that guide them(/are them) are strongly hinted to be those same AIs, just degraded over ~19,000 years. They were sidelined later on, after humans discovered FTL through an alternate dimension, 'the immaterium'.
2. The story is very obviously based on Dune, and like everything else in 40k is turned up to 11 and stripped of nuance for effect. Some sentient robots ('Men of Iron') "revolted" after ~three millenia of brutal, Star Wars-style slavery, but the overarching "Age of Strife" was about human wars in an non-unified galaxy, with the robots being a primary weapon; the actual revolt/jihad was a symptom, just like it was in Dune.
3. The 'Adeptus Mechanicus' mentioned above are a parody of cargo cults (religions that worship technology they don't understand) mixed with a dystopian take on the themes of A Canticle for Lebowitz, and are very much depicted with derision. Whatever your thoughts are on AI, dear reader, please never say "abominable intelligence" like it's wisdom rather than the fruit of a dogmatic & ineffective cult!
Of course, 40k lore is notoriously amorphous; some authors have said/hinted otherwise. But I think the above interpretation is the most coherent and interesting and supported overall, IMHO. For example, #2 is supported by the fact that the space elves ('Aeldari'/Eldar) ruled the galaxy at the time and seemed unconcerned by humanity's antics, which wouldn't make sense in light of an actual ASI threat proper.
A fun idea I've been playing around with and testing on folks: We need a neo-temperance movement.
The first reaction is a scoff and a laugh of course - wasn't the original temperance movement an utter failure, prohibition didn't work etc. But no, the movement was far wider and successful in a multitude of ways. And a new temperance movement isn't about blindly copying something old, but situating yourself around the turn of the 20th century, understanding the multitude of interconnected problems people faced, the solutions they came up with and which ones worked and didn't.
America at the turn of the 20th century was a nasty place - there was wild corruption, politics was run by mafia-like patronage networks, wealth was extremely concentrated, rich people were unaccountable, working people suffered under low-paying, dangerous jobs, women were excluded from public life, and alcohol was merely the symptom of a very sick society, and yes indeed it was a massive problem, the way alcoholism is a massive problem in Russia today.
The original temperance movement was bound up tightly with the Suffarage movement (giving women a voice), with Taylorism (running organizations rationally), with income tax (a fairer less corruptible source of income for the federal government than tariffs and excise taxes).
Today's problems are thematically the same - massive concentration of wealth is making an unaccountable elite wielding power against the wishes of the public, creating dangerously addictive digital products, massive increase in gambling, restricting the rights of poeple to own and repair products, working to disenfranchise people, working to roll back women's participation in public life, etc etc. So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons, and we'll need the same type of movement to fight against them.
What the progressives of the early 20th century did was not abolish capitalism, but tame it. We don't need to go on a jihad against AI, but we do need to yoke it and disempower the current slate of people who own it and direct it.
> So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons
what is sex referring to in this context? is this talking about societal attitudes toward sex, sex as in gender, or something else?
The death scene of the AI and its assassin/partner in death in Look to Windward is one of the best written things in his books.
God I wish he had written 1000 more novels. Every single one of his stories is phenomenal, even the non culture stuff. The Wasp Factory was the first of his novels I read. Imagine my surprise and elation in finding that most of his other works were absolute top tier sci-fi.
To be more specific, the machine Minds rule the Culture civilisation and the humanoids are effectively mere pampered pets.
(Several characters in the novels comment on this, so it is entirely cannon.)
The Culture fought a war against the Idirans, who eschew the use of intelligent machines. The Idirans lost.
Similarly, the Gzilt civilisation in the novel The Hydrogen Sonata prefer to run their ships with a quorum of uploaded humanoid mind states running at highly accelerated speeds.
There is actually an active "BJ" group in the Phoenix Metro area. It was about a year ago when I noticed they were slapping up custom graffiti stickers on Central Avenue (Midtown).
Then later, I saw their handiwork in person: they would take an angle-grinder and obliterate the QR Code from those rental e-Scooters, slap on a BJ sticker or three, and then leave them where they found them. This would render the scooters as e-waste, un-rentable and blocking the sidewalks.
I would not be surprised if they are quietly influencing groups which are agitating against AI Data Centers. But the BJ I have seen is a chaotic group of direct urban sabotage.
Maybe, but Frank Herbert's Dune books don't really explain it. The Butlerians simply exist to justify Mentats, and then get tossed aside. There are lots of similar plot points that have an "oh cool" moment but never see proper exploration.
Dune's central theme about balancing power and authority is much more prescient for our time, but I suppose we'll have to wait for Villeneuve's Part 3 before Silicon Valley discusses it.
The Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild were also a result of the Butlerian Jihad. All three started as schools of human development in the absence of powerful technology.
Also, Herbert's point about dependence on machines creating machine-dependent humans, trapped in a deterministic arc of evolution, feeds into his larger themes about open-ended evolution and its arms-race. It's not just a throwaway backstory.
I feel like the book explains it plenty, it's just extremely succinct.
> “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.”
What else needs to be said? We see examples of this throughout human history all the time. People thought at the early onset of the industrialization that people would become freer by leaving feudalism but all it did was immiserate workers for another 130 years (immiseration still ongoing in certain areas of the world).
It made me think about the book of the new sun. you think its half man half monster creatures are unrealistic? give it a couple thousand years. good sci-fi really is prescient
Yeah, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, most science fiction depicted the world of the future as dominated by Japan… Look at Robocop 3 :)
That's just what the zeitgeist of the time was.
Computers were then just appearing (or increasing) in the public discussion, along with fears that they'll make humans less human somehow.
Like in this Computer Chronicles video about word processing [0] from 1983 at 4:08: "Some writers are concerned that computer assistance may promote dry bland writing."
Terminator appeared in 1984, and the first Alien movie in 1979 had an antagonist android. 2001 A Space Odyssey with a disagreeable AI came out in 1968. All way before the real world had anything remotely close to today's AI: It was a reaction to the appearance of computers themselves.
That just shows that humans have the same reactions whenever a new world-changing technology appears.
On the other hand, Star Trek had Data.
Ironically, the tech that people and media were mostly optimistic about turned out to be more dystopian than predicted: The internet :')
Interesting to see this on HN! I've been beating the drum for quite a while that the Butlerian Jihad was never about terminator-style robot uprisings, but rather the intentionally-unexamined half of the themes the Dune ~trilogy ended up being about: long term fate of the species, the prospect of human speciation, the role of cold reason (read: aggressive utilitarianism) in leadership, and above all the concentration of power in light of modern technology.
All he mentioned explicitly was the very last clause, but the others are more important & uniquely-Dunean IMHO, and are central to the plot from the jump through the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, and the Guild Navigators, all ostensibly Homo sapiens sapiens despite being completely unnatural. Even "Imperial Conditioning" --which obviously plays the biggest part in the first act of the first book-- is arguably the same topic.
By refusing to include computers and robots at all, the reader is naturally guided to consider those more familiar tropes in light of the world-building snippets we get. Which is kinda what makes Dune so genius, I think!
Like, to make it explicit... I think having the aforementioned abhumans drive the plot without significant support from inhuman minds raises more subtle questions than we're used to in far-future tales of robots, like:
1. Can one lose their humanity through experience, be it intentional "conditioning" or just the acquisition of power? (see: Paul vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)
2. Once one has lost their humanity superficially, can it be brought back/up/forward? Is love/greif the most plausible path, and thus the most human cognitive processes? (see: Dr. Yueh vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)
3. If we try to maintain our humanity in the long term --the default goal of non-insane futurists, though debated in the 21st c.[1][2]-- how do we protect against the natural urge to pursue power, which is (arguably) inherently human?[3]
I'll cut it off there cause this threat will likely be deleted anyway and I'm heavily procrastinating. Long story short: the Butlerian Jihad is not a condemnation of artificial minds, and if even it were, the condemnation would apply equally as much if not more so to the humanist empire in which the story is set.
Also, hopefully obvious, but just in case: it likely began as an excuse to write the stories that he wanted to write, just like the shield thing giving an excuse for swords in space. But I think Herbert deserves credit for what was running underneath that and elaborated on as it became a series of novels rather than cute periodical stories. He was pretty smart!
Also also: we do not discuss the son's book about Butler lol. It is verboten.
The actual linked wikia article is short on the actual detail and background of exactly why the Butlarian Jihad actually happened.
I’m an avid Dune fan. Sidebar/background: The son of the Dune writer, Brian Herbert, and his cowriter Kevin J. Anderson wrote the setting, events, and conclusion to the actual Butlarian Jihad conflictt. It’s largely derided by scifi fans, but is highly entertaining. It’s actually still ongoing almost 3 decades later. And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out. But I digress…
Here’s how it went down in the dune universe (I’m certainly messing up some details, but these are the broad strokes):
Humanity has spread to the stars. No FTL involved, just good old fashioned sublight engines. The dune universe takes place about 50-60,000 years in our future. Mankind has spread across a couple dozen solar systems and everything is going peachy. However, mankind gets complacent, fat, and happy with their success and society stagnates. A handful of eager, ambitious humans scheme about how they can take it all over. They do, and then eventually start turning themselves into cyborgs, or disembodies brains in a jars that swap bodies and are effectively immortal. One of the cyborgs gets lazy and makes an AI to manage things, which promptly takes over, overthrows the cyborg rulers of humanity, makes the cyborgs it’s slaves (who have great autonomy/are conspirators) and generally rules over everything. A small group of solar systems is left under human control, who fall back to a feudal-ish type system of government with lords and dukes and whatnot.
The AI does all sorts of nasty shit to the humans in it’s dominion. Unit 931 and Auschwitz type experiences, slavery until death, etc. Untold billions, if not trillions, of humans live in animal-like conditons worked to death. The human group of systems isn’t cool with this, but they can’t do much and are vastly overpowered by the cyborgs, so a fragile peace is held. One day, the son of one of the subservient cyborgs knocks up a human slave, and they have a kid. In the background, all sorts of rabble rousing and shenanigans are being done to stir unrest amoungst the slaves by the free human system. The human systems develop FTL, with spice as a catalyst, except it doesn’t work 10% of the time and kills the pilots. The AI’s main henchman (who does all of the nazi and Unit 931-type experiments) decides it would be cool to kill the baby of the cyborg son and the slave. The slaves last name was “Butler”/ This sparks a massive revolt by the slave worlds. The free human systems then go on to fight a prolonged war against the machines, using the FTL drive at great loss of life, to begin a “Butlarian jihad” to free the humans from thinking machines. Lots of other stuff happens, and humanity eventually wins, but this is why machines no more advanced than a desktop machine are allowed in the dune universe, and why they technologically hobble themselves.
Highly relevant then. HN tends to discuss the things that are either meaningful today or what they are building in their garage that is often meaningful in 5-10 years.
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
So, in a way, we're more likely to see the Dune version of "machines taking over the world/universe" than say, Terminator's even though many joke about ChatGPT/Claude being Skynet.
*: except Leto II, and he doesn't say much about it
Another, more subtle justification for the Butlerian Jihad is also found in Frank Herbert's original novels, specifically Heidegger's thesis that the use of technology trains humans to think like machines. The problem is that machines are deterministic; thus, training people to be machines is self-limiting.
I wonder whether Heidegger would consider the probabilistic nature of LLMs as having a positive effect on human thought.
Writing code is a creative activity with large number of degrees of freedom and opportunities to express yourself. Button pushing and approving code changes is a deeply limiting activity that alienates you from your work.
So you get a different type of conformism where people who interact with LLMs a lot are going to be influenced towards the median, as encoded in those token probability look up tables.
The effect is basically the same as what Heidegger and Illich were worried about, and I think we're seeing it happen already everywhere.
A solution(?) is to try to be your true weird authentic self when you act in the world, rather than bending your words and behaviours to the machine and LLM probability shape.
And I distinctly feel AI outputs lack some of that variance and unpredictability. The fractal nature of natural things also is not there with AI. It's an eery feeling, akin to the uncanny valley.
I think that any good writing is a reflection of that Dasein and reading AI outputs I am convinced there is no 'soul' in AI yet.
It's those humans who would make and justify the use of thinking machines that are biased in the same way without accounting for the bias.
This isn't an extinction path I've seen noted in most circles.
Prompt: “Pick a random number between 1 and 10. Do not use a script or program.”
LLM: “7”
1. In Science and Reflection, he says that both the 'completely calculated' nature of classical mechanics and the 'statistical character' of quantum mechanics are two representation of an underlying 'objectness of material nature'.
2. In Discourse on Thinking, he's far more concerned with the instrumental, utilitarian nature of machines than literal determinism, a concept he (somewhat confusingly/uniquely) connects to computation/'computational thinking', as opposed to the inherently-human capability for 'meditative thinking'. I personally would say this bit is refuted by LLMs in the end, but because they have intuitive rationality, a capability that seemed impossible to artificially design to the scientists of the time -- not because they involve dice.
3. In What is Thinking?, he gives the closest connection of this dichotomy to one of his better-known main topics, namely [handi]craft as a special subset of work: 'what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.' In this sense machines would be merely manipulating tools, stochastic or otherwise.
4. Overall I get the sense from skimming that lecture that his concern is a little mischaracterized, and in a kind of beautiful way that backs up my "Dune is still about AI" thesis described in a top-level comment somewhere below: his concern is about any society that could build complex machines (a 'technological' one), not the behavioral aspects of the machines themselves. So that concern applies equally to Star Trek (AGI), 1984 (no AGI), and our current post-singularity society (it's complicated/potentially ""just"" guessing).
All of this fits very well into his central thesis, which is continuing the Kantian & Hegelian tradition of examining how humans might be moral, free, and spiritual despite being meat computers of a largely-unknowable nature. In Heideggerland, this is expressed best in dramatic, nigh-unreadable passages like:
TL;DR: He'd probably think they're still just machines, and the question isn't really sound in the first place. IMHO!(Or "spice" might be synthesized. In Herbert's day (the 1960s) organic chemistry wasn't up to synthesizing arbitrary small-molecule drugs, but now it is. It's a service you can order on line, even. Biologicals take more work, but that's what genetic engineering is for.)
The "mental powers" in Dune aren't that impressive. Compare, say, the Harry Potter universe. In Dune, mentats can convince people. Bene Gesserit can look up stuff in their genetic past. Some people can multitask. There are apps for that.
Herbert wanted knife fighters to matter in battle. Not going to happen. Militaries teach knife fighting to build aggression and for desperate situations, but nobody's battle plan depends on a knife fight. Needs too much surprise. Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat. Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets. Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War. Herbert wrote before a big, modern, desert war.
So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.
https://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-pa...
what does the Butlerian Jihad “working” mean?
People keep putting the cart before the horse on this one, and the degree to which modern people have been lulled by fiction is quite worrying. Amusing ourselves to death.
Indeed.
the immediate cause of the Jihad is the abortion of the healthy fetus of a Bene Gesserit, Jehanne Butler, by an AI."
I was fairly surprised when his son wrote a novel that felt like a generic, bland robots run amok storyline that happened, more or less, because one guy/titan "ruined a good thing" by telling his AI to run in permissionless mode.
the other jihad in the first novel is that of the Fremen, which is described as being unspeakable violent, so I find it hard to imagine these to be different in that regard.
The creation of a Silica Animus is also a terrible crime under Imperial Law by the decree of the Emperor of Mankind Himself as stated in the Treaty of Mars which united the ancient Mechanicum of Mars with the Imperium of Terra in 739.M30. Tradition holds that such unholy constructs are inherently evil and a perverted abomination in the sight of the Omnissiah.
Adeptus Mechanicus religious doctrine states that the Machine Spirit of a Silica Animus is a twisted mockery of the soul of a Human, always treacherous and insane.
Ancient texts tell apocryphal stories, shrouded in metaphor, of such murderous and powerful creations during the Age of Technology, and the legions of the "Men of Iron" that served them in the great war against Humanity remembered as the "Cybernetic Revolt."
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Silica_Animus
So yes, anything that is supposed policy in the Imperium is supposed to be taken with buckets of salt.
Whether one is made from meat or metal, kin is kin. Upon their creation Ironkin are fully welcome into their respective Hold by the rest of the Kin.[10]
Ironkin are computationally advanced enough that they have learned to mimic the squats' social behavior
...
Though the purpose of the Ironkin is to support squats in every aspect of their lives, they are neither held in servitude nor treated as lessers. The Ironkin are simply designed to want to be helpful. However, they can only imitate the emotions of the squats, and it is rare, but not unknown, for an Ironkin to possess ambition or seek to become a leader.
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ironkin
Three very quick thoughts:
1. The Votann are remnants of humanity from the time when our Terran super-AIs ('Men of Gold') had built advanced ship-based AIs ('Men of Stone') to enable long-sleep-style interstellar colonization, and the enigmatic "Votann Cores" that guide them(/are them) are strongly hinted to be those same AIs, just degraded over ~19,000 years. They were sidelined later on, after humans discovered FTL through an alternate dimension, 'the immaterium'.
2. The story is very obviously based on Dune, and like everything else in 40k is turned up to 11 and stripped of nuance for effect. Some sentient robots ('Men of Iron') "revolted" after ~three millenia of brutal, Star Wars-style slavery, but the overarching "Age of Strife" was about human wars in an non-unified galaxy, with the robots being a primary weapon; the actual revolt/jihad was a symptom, just like it was in Dune.
3. The 'Adeptus Mechanicus' mentioned above are a parody of cargo cults (religions that worship technology they don't understand) mixed with a dystopian take on the themes of A Canticle for Lebowitz, and are very much depicted with derision. Whatever your thoughts are on AI, dear reader, please never say "abominable intelligence" like it's wisdom rather than the fruit of a dogmatic & ineffective cult!
Of course, 40k lore is notoriously amorphous; some authors have said/hinted otherwise. But I think the above interpretation is the most coherent and interesting and supported overall, IMHO. For example, #2 is supported by the fact that the space elves ('Aeldari'/Eldar) ruled the galaxy at the time and seemed unconcerned by humanity's antics, which wouldn't make sense in light of an actual ASI threat proper.
The first reaction is a scoff and a laugh of course - wasn't the original temperance movement an utter failure, prohibition didn't work etc. But no, the movement was far wider and successful in a multitude of ways. And a new temperance movement isn't about blindly copying something old, but situating yourself around the turn of the 20th century, understanding the multitude of interconnected problems people faced, the solutions they came up with and which ones worked and didn't.
America at the turn of the 20th century was a nasty place - there was wild corruption, politics was run by mafia-like patronage networks, wealth was extremely concentrated, rich people were unaccountable, working people suffered under low-paying, dangerous jobs, women were excluded from public life, and alcohol was merely the symptom of a very sick society, and yes indeed it was a massive problem, the way alcoholism is a massive problem in Russia today.
The original temperance movement was bound up tightly with the Suffarage movement (giving women a voice), with Taylorism (running organizations rationally), with income tax (a fairer less corruptible source of income for the federal government than tariffs and excise taxes).
Today's problems are thematically the same - massive concentration of wealth is making an unaccountable elite wielding power against the wishes of the public, creating dangerously addictive digital products, massive increase in gambling, restricting the rights of poeple to own and repair products, working to disenfranchise people, working to roll back women's participation in public life, etc etc. So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons, and we'll need the same type of movement to fight against them.
What the progressives of the early 20th century did was not abolish capitalism, but tame it. We don't need to go on a jihad against AI, but we do need to yoke it and disempower the current slate of people who own it and direct it.
what is sex referring to in this context? is this talking about societal attitudes toward sex, sex as in gender, or something else?
Another outgrowth: Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a reaction to the end of Prohibition, turning the prohibition internal rather than universal.
God I wish he had written 1000 more novels. Every single one of his stories is phenomenal, even the non culture stuff. The Wasp Factory was the first of his novels I read. Imagine my surprise and elation in finding that most of his other works were absolute top tier sci-fi.
(Several characters in the novels comment on this, so it is entirely cannon.)
The Culture fought a war against the Idirans, who eschew the use of intelligent machines. The Idirans lost.
Similarly, the Gzilt civilisation in the novel The Hydrogen Sonata prefer to run their ships with a quorum of uploaded humanoid mind states running at highly accelerated speeds.
Then later, I saw their handiwork in person: they would take an angle-grinder and obliterate the QR Code from those rental e-Scooters, slap on a BJ sticker or three, and then leave them where they found them. This would render the scooters as e-waste, un-rentable and blocking the sidewalks.
I would not be surprised if they are quietly influencing groups which are agitating against AI Data Centers. But the BJ I have seen is a chaotic group of direct urban sabotage.
Dune's central theme about balancing power and authority is much more prescient for our time, but I suppose we'll have to wait for Villeneuve's Part 3 before Silicon Valley discusses it.
Also, Herbert's point about dependence on machines creating machine-dependent humans, trapped in a deterministic arc of evolution, feeds into his larger themes about open-ended evolution and its arms-race. It's not just a throwaway backstory.
> “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.”
What else needs to be said? We see examples of this throughout human history all the time. People thought at the early onset of the industrialization that people would become freer by leaving feudalism but all it did was immiserate workers for another 130 years (immiseration still ongoing in certain areas of the world).
It's basically rentierism taken to the extremes.
Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353670
It made me think about the book of the new sun. you think its half man half monster creatures are unrealistic? give it a couple thousand years. good sci-fi really is prescient
That's just what the zeitgeist of the time was.
Computers were then just appearing (or increasing) in the public discussion, along with fears that they'll make humans less human somehow.
Like in this Computer Chronicles video about word processing [0] from 1983 at 4:08: "Some writers are concerned that computer assistance may promote dry bland writing."
Terminator appeared in 1984, and the first Alien movie in 1979 had an antagonist android. 2001 A Space Odyssey with a disagreeable AI came out in 1968. All way before the real world had anything remotely close to today's AI: It was a reaction to the appearance of computers themselves.
That just shows that humans have the same reactions whenever a new world-changing technology appears.
On the other hand, Star Trek had Data.
Ironically, the tech that people and media were mostly optimistic about turned out to be more dystopian than predicted: The internet :')
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt0OoXluC8g
All he mentioned explicitly was the very last clause, but the others are more important & uniquely-Dunean IMHO, and are central to the plot from the jump through the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, and the Guild Navigators, all ostensibly Homo sapiens sapiens despite being completely unnatural. Even "Imperial Conditioning" --which obviously plays the biggest part in the first act of the first book-- is arguably the same topic. By refusing to include computers and robots at all, the reader is naturally guided to consider those more familiar tropes in light of the world-building snippets we get. Which is kinda what makes Dune so genius, I think!
Like, to make it explicit... I think having the aforementioned abhumans drive the plot without significant support from inhuman minds raises more subtle questions than we're used to in far-future tales of robots, like:
1. Can one lose their humanity through experience, be it intentional "conditioning" or just the acquisition of power? (see: Paul vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)
2. Once one has lost their humanity superficially, can it be brought back/up/forward? Is love/greif the most plausible path, and thus the most human cognitive processes? (see: Dr. Yueh vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)
3. If we try to maintain our humanity in the long term --the default goal of non-insane futurists, though debated in the 21st c.[1][2]-- how do we protect against the natural urge to pursue power, which is (arguably) inherently human?[3]
I'll cut it off there cause this threat will likely be deleted anyway and I'm heavily procrastinating. Long story short: the Butlerian Jihad is not a condemnation of artificial minds, and if even it were, the condemnation would apply equally as much if not more so to the humanist empire in which the story is set.
Also, hopefully obvious, but just in case: it likely began as an excuse to write the stories that he wanted to write, just like the shield thing giving an excuse for swords in space. But I think Herbert deserves credit for what was running underneath that and elaborated on as it became a series of novels rather than cute periodical stories. He was pretty smart!
Also also: we do not discuss the son's book about Butler lol. It is verboten.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Became_Posthuman
[3]: This kind of structural conflict could be described as 'internal contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism or 'endogenous contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogeneity_(econometrics) depending on your preferred flavor of economics.
Here’s how it went down in the dune universe (I’m certainly messing up some details, but these are the broad strokes):
Humanity has spread to the stars. No FTL involved, just good old fashioned sublight engines. The dune universe takes place about 50-60,000 years in our future. Mankind has spread across a couple dozen solar systems and everything is going peachy. However, mankind gets complacent, fat, and happy with their success and society stagnates. A handful of eager, ambitious humans scheme about how they can take it all over. They do, and then eventually start turning themselves into cyborgs, or disembodies brains in a jars that swap bodies and are effectively immortal. One of the cyborgs gets lazy and makes an AI to manage things, which promptly takes over, overthrows the cyborg rulers of humanity, makes the cyborgs it’s slaves (who have great autonomy/are conspirators) and generally rules over everything. A small group of solar systems is left under human control, who fall back to a feudal-ish type system of government with lords and dukes and whatnot.
The AI does all sorts of nasty shit to the humans in it’s dominion. Unit 931 and Auschwitz type experiences, slavery until death, etc. Untold billions, if not trillions, of humans live in animal-like conditons worked to death. The human group of systems isn’t cool with this, but they can’t do much and are vastly overpowered by the cyborgs, so a fragile peace is held. One day, the son of one of the subservient cyborgs knocks up a human slave, and they have a kid. In the background, all sorts of rabble rousing and shenanigans are being done to stir unrest amoungst the slaves by the free human system. The human systems develop FTL, with spice as a catalyst, except it doesn’t work 10% of the time and kills the pilots. The AI’s main henchman (who does all of the nazi and Unit 931-type experiments) decides it would be cool to kill the baby of the cyborg son and the slave. The slaves last name was “Butler”/ This sparks a massive revolt by the slave worlds. The free human systems then go on to fight a prolonged war against the machines, using the FTL drive at great loss of life, to begin a “Butlarian jihad” to free the humans from thinking machines. Lots of other stuff happens, and humanity eventually wins, but this is why machines no more advanced than a desktop machine are allowed in the dune universe, and why they technologically hobble themselves.