Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

grey-area

Seems a bit premature given the current state of word generators.

orbital-decay

Of course the article mixes things up in order to push a cheap narrative. Herbert's Butlerian Jihad was a rehash of Islamic ban on images of people that is supposed to prevent idolatry and preserve uniqueness of God. It's purely religious in nature and has nothing to do with "tools of oppression". Not to mention that absolutely any automation, even the simplest kind, was considered a thinking machine and was banned, not just that arbitrary range of things called AI.

ArneCode

I think it is unlikely that people will act to completely abolish technology once they are used to it in their everyday lives.

tomaytotomato

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.

2d8a875f-39a2-4

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 tales for what they are.

Sol-

Doesn't it seem implausible that in the world of Dune they reached their level of technology without AGI? Perhaps all their tech is pre Butlerian Jihad, but even that seems questionable. Seems like if it was adopted as a policy, there would have to be many gray areas where people pretend that they aren't really using AI - the ship's computer is just a domain specific finetuned version, after all, etc. Additionally, the transhumanist ambitions represented by the Bene Gesserit or Navigator seem on par with all AI dangers to me. Why would the dangers of an incomprehensible machine mind be worse than the dangers of a transhuman being that was bred and optimized for generations? Who solved the alignment problem for these superhumans?

fxj

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, CFD, etc., where they show up as "PDE‑Transformer", "Neural Operator", or "Hybrid Surrogate Model", and not as "chatbot". ;-) So even if you outlaw certain AI uses, the core tech will just move into scientific and engineering workflows under different names, where most people won’t recognize it. Would be interesting whether it is possible to write a LLM-like program just using compression and function interpolation algoritms. just my 2 ct

dev_l1x_be

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

ArcHound

The article had a great opportunity to at least reference the newest encyclical from the Pope. With a bit of click bait, this might be the first step of "Butlerian Jihad" -> "AI Crusade" and a founding text for the Orange CATHOLIC Bible. I saw a take that you can now cite religious reasons to refuse working on and with AI - if more people try this, I wonder how it'd play out. Interesting times.

expedition32

The Chinese government cares a lot about civil unrest. Which is why they are being much more careful with AI. They remember how the CCP came into power. More concerned about America. Its freedom of speech means that every douchebag billionaire tech bro is allowed to run of their mouth and rile up the proles.

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.

GeoAtreides

>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. .

yomismoaqui

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.

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.

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.