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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
It made me think about the book of the new sun. you think it's half man half monster creatures are unrealistic? give it a couple thousand years. good sci-fi really is prescient
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed.
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.
Another outgrowth: Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a reaction to the end of Prohibition, turning the prohibition internal rather than universal.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 it's half man half monster creatures are unrealistic? give it a couple thousand years. good sci-fi really is prescient
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.