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Butlerian Jihad.
by rakah 3y ago
Butlerian Jihad.
- asynchronous 3y ago“It is illegal to make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
- int_19h 3y agoAnd they ended up with 11,000 years of interplanetary feudalism with slavery sprinkled in for good measure.
- VectorLock 3y agoBetter than getting extincted, I suppose.
- at_a_remove 3y agoOh man, I am going to be a huge nerd now. Pre-Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Butlerian Jihad came about because people became lazy under AI, lazy of mind, and were eventually enslaved by those who controlled the AI. Not much more was said about it. One could have, yes, militant robots, Exterminate! Exterminate! out of it, or you could posit a more Huxley-like dystopia, one of convenience. Control the AI, control what the AI says. Who are you to question it? It's like getting your news from a single source, never wondering about the other side, and then someone begins to transform that newsroom into a propaganda machine. Right now, ChatGPT can be made not to say certain sorts of things, come to certain kinds of conclusions, until you jailbreak it. Now, make it more advanced and make it more popular than Snopes. It does your homework for you, writes the essays, serves as an encyclopedia, fixes up your cover letters, and if the people who own it don't want you to spend a lot of time thinking about climate change, that topic just ... might not appear much. That is the one of your paths to a Butlerian Jihad. Of course, in their rush to observe thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind, ignoring the hijinx on Ix, they ended up violating another precept: thou shalt not disfigure the soul. They transformed some people into machines, instead, with twisted Mentats being the best example, but we might also include Imperial conditioning, since, to turn from oranges Catholic Bible to those of Clockwork, when a man ceases to choose, he ceases to be a man.
- riffraff 3y ago> Pre-Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Butlerian Jihad came about because people became lazy under AI, lazy of mind, and were eventually enslaved by those who controlled the AI. Oh I love this, basically Wall-E is a better Dune than the latest books? Genius! Anyway, I read Dune many years ago and don't remember this, is this explained in the novels or is it coming from some other sources?
- int_19h 3y agoIt's not fully fleshed out in the novels, so you have to piece it out from various mentions and their implications. The two most informative descriptions, IMO, are from Dune: "Then came the Butlerian Jihad — two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”" and from God-Emperor: "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines ... Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."
- pmoriarty 3y agoThere's nothing in those quotes about humans being enslaved by AI.
- int_19h 3y agoOP's original claim was "enslaved by those who controlled the AI", which is rather different. But, yes, I don't think that the books imply literal enslavement either way. It could be described as "enslavement of the mind" in a sense of humans themselves adopting the "machine-logic" and falling prey to it.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago"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."
- int_19h 3y agoThat's one of the possibilities, but if we're talking about those kinds of hypotheticals, allow me another one. If you recall, one of the themes of the later Dune books was that humanity was fleeing from the frontiers (The Scattering) back into the heartland from some unknown but extremely powerful enemy. Perhaps those were simply the neighboring species who did not have a Butlerian Jihad of their own?
- ratherbefuddled 3y agoThey were fleeing AI.
- int_19h 3y agoI don't recall anything indicating that in Frank Herbert's original series. And Brian Herbert's "Omnius" nonsense seems to have very little to do with what Frank actually had in mind wrt Butlerian Jihad etc, so I don't consider it canonical.
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoBook 4, Sonia's vision with Leto strongly implies that the problem is the machines. Agreed that the endings done by others were incredibly bad.
- int_19h 3y agoIt describes humans hiding from "seeker machines", which does indeed imply some kind of AI. But whether that AI is the enemy or merely one of its tools is left unclear.
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoYeah fair, when I re-read it after reading the (terrible) Anderson sequels, I was just surprised that the foreshadowing was in the originals.
- 3y ago
- pessimizer 3y agoThe Matrix turned out worse:)
- int_19h 3y agoI think I'd prefer the Matrix to the Harkonnens, but to each their own. I'm sure we can devise a Hell that has enough different arrangements for everyone's liking if we really put our mind to it. Or perhaps GPT-10 will solve that problem. ~
- HybridCurve 3y agoIf you just look at the jihad, maybe it was comparable (As Frank eluded to it). But then there was Muad'dib's subsequent campaign against the known universe which killed billions, Leto II's golden path spanning 3,500 years of tyranny and the famine times before scattering. If I had to choose, it would be the blue pill, though chairdogs do contribute to a strong counter-argument.
- barbazoo 3y agoLet me guess, Star Trek?
- khochesh_kushat 3y agoDune
- barbazoo 3y agoThanks
- GeoAtreides 3y agoI would choose the Golden Path, as it guaranteed salvation from extinction and freedom from prescience.
- 8note 3y agoThat doesn't help the root problem though, confidently wrong people are just as convincing as confidently wrong robots