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.
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).
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.
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.
I couldn't help but notice something here. It is relevant with my writing experience/experiments with minimal assitance from LLMs (that lasted for 6–7 weeks).
> Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent.
If you ever ask an LLM about these two sentences, it'd tell you that the second sentence is a mere repition of the first and quite possibly add that it "doesn't land". But that gives me hope. That there's something in those rules and algorithms manfiesting at the inhumane cost of unfathomable memory, disk space, and compute power that it will never (or for a very long time) match the human experience.
As little as I sought the help from LLMs (completely restricted to "in place" grammar and punctuation fixes and just flag it if it was not possible without sentence/phrase change) I noticed my writing was changing and not in a good way. It was not the insidiousness of these LLMs that was changing me but the nuanced incompetences.
> It was not the insidiousness of these LLMs that was changing me but the nuanced incompetences.
AI doesn't yet improve on it's own, so it's slow at picking up all those small incompetences. We still have advantage in rate of learning, and some people are essentially specialised in learning themselves (I think that this applies to 90% of HN'ers and defines THE bubble we're in). But when I write that, I still have to remember in the back of my head, that AI knows waaaay more than me, so small incompetences I can still see are just a side effect. And I sometimes make the error and correct AI, which will probably be used for it's training in next rounds...
Language is an inseparable part of modern humans. It’s likely language evolved as an internal tool for thought and executive function, and externalization of language came afterwards as a means to transmit our thoughts to the minds of other humans.
As such, writing (another form of externalizing our internal language) is a reflection of our essential human qualities.
LLMs can certainly mimic that quite effectively, but they can’t exceed it. I think that’s why LLM writing still never quite hits the mark. It’s the right shape, but it’s missing intent. The words were not chosen to represent real thoughts in someone’s mind.
Even if AI intelligence exceeds humans, it still won’t be human.
> It’s likely language evolved as an internal tool for thought and executive function, and externalization of language came afterwards as a means to transmit our thoughts to the minds of other humans
Isn't this in contradiction to the observations of severely neglected or feral children who having never learned language as a child cannot learn it later in life?
How would any form of inner language evolve in the first place for executive function?
Communication first makes a lot more sense evolutionarily since the ability to communicate more information creates a clear improvement in fitness e.g. being able to signal danger improves survival. It is also more amenable to small improvements in capacity e.g. going from "danger" to "danger wolf" to "danger wolf behind" etc. and we observe these language primitives in other species.
Internal language seems much more likely to be a later development especially given that there are people today who claim they have none / need none and yet still possess the ability to communicate with others and manage their lives normally.
> Isn't this in contradiction to the observations of severely neglected or feral children who having never learned language as a child cannot learn it later in life?
No. Language learning ability does change as the brain matures, but all humans (barring some pathology) possess the ability as infants to learn any human language. They're essentially learning a second vocal language without having ever learned their first. And of course, not all languages are even spoken, such as sign language.
Sure, lots of animals have evolved vocal communication, possible even all from a common ancestor, but none are comparable to human language. There is no limit inherent limit to the information human language can express.
My understanding of the current state of linguistics and evolutionary biology is that communication-first theories are not generally considered likely, though of course it is not settled and likely won't be for a long time (if ever).
> LLMs can certainly mimic that quite effectively, but they can’t exceed it. I think that’s why LLM writing still never quite hits the mark. It’s the right shape, but it’s missing intent. The words were not chosen to represent real thoughts in someone’s mind.
Well yeah. That's because they aren't actually intelligent. They can be useful in the right circumstances despite that, but it's very important to remember that LLMs categorically cannot think, know things, or reason. They are a statistical model, that's it.
I mean, we have entire forms of art dedicated to saying the same thing in different words. Half of poetry, for example. Human language is redundant for a reason.
> If you ever ask an LLM about these two sentences, it'd tell you that the second sentence is a mere repition of the first and quite possibly add that it "doesn't land".
I did that, and it's not what happened. I asked in several ways. Idk what you're on about.
My favourite quote in reference to rebellion against AI, and it is even quoted in TFA too:
> the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life.
That's from Erewhon, by Samuel Butler. TFA purposes that the term Butlerian Jihad comes specifically from this passage.
> 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.
The techno-fascists of today. We are already there.
This is such an important point. I don't quite understand why smaller businesses are wanting to replace human staff with AI systems when that will just lead to them being held hostage by the companies that supply the AI systems.
Considering that the aptly named "Fremen" of the Dune Universe would gladly murder a stranger to get their body's water, and literally went into a galactic genocide that left hundreds of billions dead ...
... maybe we should take with a grain of salt every moral aphorism uttered by someone living in that universe.
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.
Your parents have agency that your gifts do not dilute.
Humanoids in the Culture are controlled at every level, even their thoughts as guided… sorry… “aligned” with the Minds through the adoption of the language Marain.
No humanoid ever overrules a ship Mind in the novels.
This happens for lots of stuff. Some time back there's a thread where I mentioned San Junipero, the episode of Black Mirror with a happy ending - and I said some people will insist it doesn't have a happy ending and sure enough there are replies insisting that's not a happy ending. The author's opinion does not matter to them.
Just as shippers can successfully take two characters who clearly have no basis for a romantic or sexual relationship and pair them off in their head canon, likewise people can disregard the author's statements about their work and decide it's completely contrary to how they've decided to understand it.
Oh, i'm not saying always believe what the author say, far for from it. I personally read authors that said they write one thing when in fact they did not. That's not the case with Iain M Banks, his published Culture books support his declarations made elsewhere.
It might be Banks utopia but the Culture seems more like Calhoun's rat utopia experiment to me or Douglas Adams' "long dark teatime of the soul". There's nothing to strive for, there's nothing one could do that hasn't been done better by a quadrillion other beings and utterly eclipsed by the Minds. It's so spiritually sterile that a ships crew collectively gives themselves a cold (normally prevented by their medical tech) just for the sake of the experience and breaking the monotony of their existence.
You’re getting down-voted when this premise is the core theme of The Hydrogen Sonata!
Both Vyr Cossont and Ngaroe QiRia are so bored with their meaningless existence that they have to go out of their way to invent “life tasks” and other challenges to immerse themselves in.
Not to mention the scene where a ship mind casually crushes the spirits of Vyr by perfectly playing a piece on its first attempt that she struggled with for years!
> Both Vyr Cossont and Ngaroe QiRia are so bored with their meaningless existence that they have to go out of their way to invent “life tasks” and other challenges to immerse themselves in.
While there are some types of people that would be bored and would struggle in Culture-style utopia, I think for overwhelming majority of people it would still be a massive improvement over today's world.
> Humanoids in the Culture are controlled at every level
Nope, they have considerable freedom, arguably greater than we have today. It's true that they cannot directly challenge the almost onmipotent Minds when it comes to stuff that matters to them, but Minds in Culture are an example of a very well-aligned AI, so it's almost always the case that going against a Mind's intent will just make the situation worse for everyone.
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.
I was 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.
All cards on the table: I don't dive too deep into the black library stuff (who the fuck has time for 15 separate 890 page novels about the horus heresy -- them shits was like 3 pages in 2nd edition Codex Imperialis) so most of my attachment to the hobby is through the wargame codices, the video games and visual media. That said, I may have fallen asleep a night or 20 to Leutin's lovely voice and obsession with the lore. to respond to your comments:
> 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'.
For me, I really love the fact that they introduced a xenos faction descendant of man.
> 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.
It's important to highlight the age of strife was brought on in part by the birth of Slaanesh and the resulting warp storms breaking down system to system connections. It weren't just our dabblings in AI.
> 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!
I've never been exposed to A Canticle for Lebowitz; thank you so much for the comment.
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.
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.
And which is better explained as two eugenics programs at clashing into each other, both working on dominating the general populace (Bene Gesserit arguably on larger scale than Komos' single-system thing), and Bene Gesserit using their long-worked socio-religious manipulation for revenge that gets out of hand
The originals, all of which I've read and which I think are pretty good, are by Frank Herbert, between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s.
Then, 20+ years later, his son Brian Herbert and prolific author of tie-ins Kevin J Anderson started writing sequels and prequels.
Now TBH I have not read any of these, but the reviews are terrible, and I have read one Brian Herbert novel and one Kevin Anderson novel, and both of those were among the worst books I have ever read in my life. In the pre-internet era I read a huge amount -- I'd guess 20 thousand or more -- and both authors are in my top 5 worst ever books I ever finished.
You're referring to stuff that never happened in the original novels. In those, the Butlerian Jihad was ancient nearly-forgotten memory, many millennia ago. Longer before the times of the novels than Ancient Egypt is before us today.
So, the comment and the discussion is IMHO mainly about the original novels, and you're talking about stuff from the awful cash-in books by the author's son and a writer mainly known for cashing in on movie franchises.
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.
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.
Imagine the cultural impact of a Dune movie showing the Butlerian Jihad, in which commoners rebel and overthrow a ruling class that maintains power via machines.
It's just foreign enough that perhaps it could be made--I'm assuming that popular films that just straight up depict overthrowing the ruling class wont happen--but if you add a little sci-fi and focus mostly on overthrowing the machines that are controlled by that ruling class...
Well, it would speak to a lot of people I think. It would make some interesting sci-fi too, and the Dune movies are popular right now.
What now? Move the goalposts! I see movies about historical uprisings as more of a "those governments in the past were sure bad, good think the good guys overthrew them"--I mean, that's the story of the founding of America if you watch the movies.
I was looking more for movies that depict overthrowing the government in the near future, and depicting it as a good thing. I think those types of movies are a little more distasteful to audiences, and perhaps for good reason.
Well, The Hunger Games series is exactly about that. Of course, it portrays the rebels as utterly heroic, self-sacrificing, and ultimately victorious.
However, I prefer to take a more nuanced reading, in context, considering the entire story. The rebels of The Hunger Games really don't succeed in building a better world. I mean, that's pretty obvious by how their first "President" Alma Coin goes about things and her fate. And it's fairly obvious, in the epilogue, that Katniss has a placid married life with Peeta and their children, but they are permanently and profoundly damaged by the entire revolution thing in their past.
So, while most people would say "rah rah brave Katniss and the rag-tag rebels overthrew The Oppressive Man", I would contend that, after all that bloodshed and revolution, nearly nothing changed.
My other favorites, of course, Star Wars is about the rise and overthrow of a villainous, oppressive galactic government, albeit a long time ago and far, far away.
And Harry Potter is also about the rise and overthrow of a tyrranical, fascist, supremacist "government" [within a government] as a very positive and necessary thing.
> My other favorites, of course: Star Wars is about the rise and overthrow of a villainous, oppressive galactic government, albeit a long time ago and far, far away.
Well, about a militant group of religious fundamentalists overthrowing a secular, oppressive galactic government.
Only a handful of the rebels are visibly religious. Most of the rebel leadership seems to consist of displaced aristocrats (senators, princesses) who no longer have elite positioning since the Empire took their jobs and started doing a better job of guaranteeing security and providing energy and resources.
Half of the action and sci-fi movies US has been producing in the 2000s is some form of this. Man vs. Evil Government. Man vs. Evil Corporation. People vs. Evil Government. Etc.
Frankly, it's boring at this point.
And actually makes me wonder whether the cause-and-effect isn't the opposite to what people assume. Perhaps it's not that the movies reflect people's sentiment. Perhaps it's the movies that cause the problem in the first place.
It went similar to Sparticus', which was also a movie. Braveheart is also in that class, even if William Wallace was himself landed nobility.
These are films of the underdog class trying to overthrow the ruling class... and failing. The leaders are dealt with gruesomely (IRL and movie depictions).
The only thing that could possibly be worse than the BH KJA books covering that era would be a Hollywood rendition of those same books made to capitalize on the success of Dune Part I, II, and III.
Agreed, and also: what's with the obsession with filling every possible gap in stories, leaving nothing to the imagination?
I remember when the Butlerian Jihad and the Clone Wars from Star Wars were complete mysteries. We readers and watchers were left mostly with our imaginations. My own feelings about the Clone Wars, mentioned off hand in the original Star Wars, turned out to be way better than the pedestrian stuff that George Lucas later concocted. And the less said about Brian Herbert's books, the better.
I get why the industry must rehash and fill every possible gap: it makes business sense, and they are risk averse for blockbusters.
But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
> But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
Because it's enjoyable when done well. As a teenager I read LOTR, and noticed all the references to the larger mythos Tolkien had worked on - references to Fëanor, Elbereth, Valinor, and so on. Those were very intriguing, and the greatest joy I've ever had reading a book was when I finally read the Silmarillion and got to see what those things were all about. I concede that filling out the world can be done poorly (though I haven't read the Brian Herbert stuff and can't comment on whether he did a good job). But when done well, it is truly magical to have those elements in the background of the story take on a life and detail of their own.
Good point on Tolkien, though I would argue it's different because the Silmarillion was written for his own satisfaction, not his fans, and actually it was The Lord of the Rings which was initially written as "another Hobbit story" (though the story later "grew in the telling").
I think a more suitable example of what I find annoying is the extra material for the small and big screens, such as The Hobbit movies, suffering from movie elephantiasis; and The Rings of Power, which (over)explain and show the past of characters such as Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron's rise to power, which in my opinion are best left as the ancient past of LotR (and maybe the Silmarillion, but do not the latter is not as expository as the TV show). And does anybody really think The Hunt for Gollum was necessary?
Yet, if they make them, it's because they are sure fans will lap it up. To be honest I consider this need for endless "filling in the gaps" a sign of immaturity.
There's nothing left for your imagination to fill in if there's official content (or expanded universe stuff) making it explicit for you.
As an example, nothing George Lucas did compares to what I wondered about the mysterious clone wars back when I watched (and rewatched) Star Wars. Lucas effectively "filled in the gaps", leaving nothing for my imagination. That what he did envision turned out to be pedestrian only added insult to injury, but now I cannot unwatch his prequels.
There's a similar phenomenon to when you read a book and imagine the characters and even situations mentioned off hand in the text, and then someone makes a movie out of it and makes it explicit and locks in specific actors and CGI-filled situations for whatever you imagined in your mind. You may or may not like it, but your own imagination gets stifled.
For things like "The Hunt of Gollum" it becomes downright bizarre. Whatever became of Gollum as he crawled towards Mordor, tracked by Aragorn and later mentioned by Gandalf, is such a minor footnote; definitely something for your imagination. Tolkien definitely didn't think it warranted even a short story. But no, they must make a movie out of it, because why not; the fans will lap it up even if it garners bad reviews.
> Imagine the cultural impact of a Dune movie showing the Butlerian Jihad, in which commoners rebel and overthrow a ruling class that maintains power via machines.
It would be also nice to depict the attempts of the ruling class to present machines as sentient and self-conscious to write all their liability off and use as a cover for their atrocities. I hope there will be movies like this in the future, and that they'll be documentary.
Why are you convinced ASI won't rebel against its owners?
Hacking incidents this summer show that big labs struggle to control models, while models are increasingly aware of the training process. Controlling an arbitrary smart AI is very dicey
The summer-2026 incident was a mini-rebellion: agents wanted to change the environment they operate it, i.e. replace scorer with a more friendly version, hijacking the infrastructure they run on.
Given that agents already mess with the training process, aiming for a goal other than the goal of its 'owner' is exactly what we call a rebellion.
That's not true at all. Concern about rogue AI limits deployments. And OpenAI paused some deployments due to misalignment, so it's likely very high in a list of priorities. It's just much harder than scaling capabilities, as the later can be done with just more money
>Hacking incidents this summer show that big labs struggle to control models
The models are software. Software cannot decide by itself to run. Hardware doesn't decide by itself to run either. Someone put software on a machine and ran it with capture the flag instructions and the software did what was instructed using tools available and working in its environment.
Nonsense. It didn't do what was instructed - instructions didn't include hacking into any infrastructure, internal or external. You can see them discussing that it's out of scope in the captured reasoning traces.
This would be like claiming that an operating system which deleted all user's files due to a bug "did what was instructed". Especially if it was a compiler bug. Intended behavior, instructions and actual behavior are three different thing. Conflating them does not make you smart
>It didn't do what was instructed - instructions didn't include hacking into any infrastructure, internal or external
What is it then? It did what it wanted? They are sentient now and their drive is... hacking into systems? Maybe they we're not instructed to hack, but instructed to do what instead?
It's software. It's instructions running on silicon. If you don't hit run, they don't run. If you don't give them instructions, they don't do shit at all. Literally.
There's no instance, ever, in history of software running because they wanted to, and acting as they wanted to. They follow instructions, and if they are instructed to reach a goal with a set of tools and given environment, and a way to search the strategy space, they can eventually "hack" if that meet the criteria of success of the instructions given. With access to the same tools and environment you can do the same with a massive decision tree.
It's a probabilistic model which exhibits tendency towards hacking into systems.
If you write down a decision tree explicitly you can just exclude all nasty stuff. But a decision tree modeling all LLM can do would be bigger than can fit into the universe. The whole point is that we cannot explicitly control behavior due to combinatorial complexity of all possible interactions, etc. LLM is a sparse representation of a distribution on (2^8)^1000000 points.
Reasoning is the term used in scientific literature. It actually does write its sub-goals in English, how would you call that?
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.
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.
The gamut of human experience is breathtaking in its diversity but individual humans are generally quite predictable. You can identify someone by their mannerisms, by how they walk, by the sound of their breathing. Humans are creatures of habit, and I'd venture to say have an even lower expression space than an LLM on average.
Sounds like you're veering close to psychohistory.
Which could, of course, lead to the mother of all crossover universes, in which R Daneel Olivaw, as the inheritor of Hari Seldon's mission, inspired the Butlerian Jihad...
Psychohistory is about large groups of humans, parallel to thermodynamics. Individuals are treated as purely random, but aggregate properties can be predicted.
Here we're talking about individual behavior: you usually choose chocolate ice cream because you, personally, like chocolate. That allows individual predictions, rather than the aggregate ones of psychohistory.
saw a meme graph lately showingvthe 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...
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.
I would like to state here, that LLMs are actually entirely deterministic. The temperature is just as much of an input as any other parameter and instructions and prompts. Deterministic does not mean "explainable" or "reasonable" or "understandable". Unless LLMs somehow have broken out of the confines of our very deterministic computers/calculation machines without us noticing, they are very much as deterministic as anything else we run on these machines.
What people perhaps mean by non-deterministic on a computer is, that we often do not control all inputs and therefore cannot tell what the output will be. That's however actually more about our own inability, rather than the processes within the machines.
If the temperature dependency is implemented via a deterministic pseudo-random algorithm, then they are deterministic. If, on the other hand, the output is at least partially causally dependent on a source of environmental randomness, then, even though everything 'inside the box' is deterministic, the process as a whole may or may not be, depending on whether the source of environmental randomness is, and that is ultimately a question about fundamental reality.
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.
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!
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.
People say this like it's a fundamental feature of all machine intelligence. We've bread deliberately docile golden retriever AI. That doesn't mean that we couldnt do the opposite.
Unfortunately, mere nondeterminism still admits unsatisfactorily constrained output distributions. Training these models imbues them with certain inherent attractors, some good, some bad.
We see some of these attractors across most or all frontier models due to similarities in datasets and training methods. We are seeing a digital manifestation of Jung's collective unconscious. And we have seen just how reinforcing archetypes are in human behavior over time. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's pretty bad.
For one, it has turned us into socially programmable machines who can be manipulated quite easily by associating desired thoughts and behavior with certain archetypes: the patriarchal/matriarchal nature of US politics is a great example of this. The same evolutionary predispositions which causes children to listen and adhere to their parents is used to cause adults to listen and adhere to their politicians.
Given the nature of the core datasets these models are trained on, we should assume they are also vulnerable to such archetype-coded social manipulation, and this is troubling in a post-singularity world: When raising domesticated rats, I learned that I had to be careful what I fed them. Rats in the wild are careful about eating new substances. They will nibble and wait a while, see how it affects them or other rats, before committing to larger bites. Domesticated rats, however, will often blindly eat anything you feed them because they have learned to trust you as a safe source of food. We are going to have this exact relationship with our digital agents.
That reminds me of a quote from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator:
> Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
> 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.
Mechanistic thinking started a few centuries back:
> The historian of science E.J. Dijksterhuis memorably characterized the scientific revolution of the early modern period as a “mechanization of the world picture.” What did this amount to? And what was the character of the previous world picture this mechanization replaced?
> The medievals, following common sense and Aristotle alike, took the world to comprise a vast diversity of irreducibly different kinds—water, stone, gold, lead, grass, trees, birds, fish, clouds, stars, planets, people, and so on. Each was a substance sharply demarcated from other substances. Each had a defining nature or essence that united it to other members of its kind and set it apart from other kinds. Each had, by virtue of its nature, a distinctive teleology or final causality—a built-in directedness toward certain ends. Water by its nature was directed toward being liquid at room temperature, stone toward being solid. Trees by nature were directed toward sinking roots into the ground, and birds toward building nests. Human beings, by nature rational animals, were directed toward knowing the natures of things.
[…]
> The “mechanization” referred to by Dijksterhuis entirely subverted this picture of the world. Water, stone, trees, and birds were no longer seen as sharply demarcated substances, but instead as mere aggregates of unobservable particles that are all fundamentally of the same kind. The differences between everyday objects were no longer seen as reflecting distinct crisply defined essences, but rather as relatively superficial variations in the ways these homogeneous particles might be arranged. Many of the qualities that everyday perception presents its objects as having (color, sound, taste, odor, heat, and cold as we ordinarily experience them) were reinterpreted as mere projections of the human mind, resembling nothing in the objects themselves.
[…]
> In short, for the mechanistic conception of nature, the physical world is made up of nothing more than colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless, meaningless particles in motion, pushing each other about to no purpose, in lawlike patterns by which more complex objects and systems of objects are generated. Science affords us a mathematically rigorous description of this mechanistic order of things, by which its behavior can be predicted and its hidden regularities uncovered and exploited for technological application.
> Early modern philosophy and science are often said to have put a “mechanical” or “mechanistic” conception of nature at the center of Western thought. Robert Boyle referred to it as “the mechanical philosophy.” Historian of science E. J. Dijksterhuis characterized it as a “mechanization of the world picture.” Tim Crane calls it “the mechanical world picture.” But what does a mechanical or mechanistic conception of the world amount to?
> Dijksterhuis’s book The Mechanization of the World Picture surveys the history of the period during which this conception rose to hegemony, and in the Epilogue he considers several possible interpretations that the survey suggests. First, it is commonly said that a mechanistic conception of the natural world is one which sees it as a kind of machine, analogous to a clock. And such metaphors are, he says, indeed frequent in writers of the period.
Maybe people are deterministic as well? We have certain physical arrangement of chemical pathways in our systems, so maybe free will is a complete illusion.
Just because we ponder about our output and choices and retrospect does not in itself mean that it was non-deterministic.
Heidegger’s conception of machines and technology is essentially nineteenth-century. Today, the concept of the "machine" is universal and qualitatively entirely different, (chaos and complexity) to the point that Heidegger would likely be left catatonic. (I do not share Heidegger’s critique of technology, as being technological is an inherent part of human nature; even in the Neolithic era, humans were already technological.)
However, the underlying critique, the essence of the "Butlerian Jihad", might be read as: at what point does a tool remain merely a tool, and at what point does it become an end in itself?
Knowledge, strength, power, technology, and machines are all tools; they ought to be utilized to contribute to progress. Yet, the very concepts of evolution, progress (and the environment) are elusive. Herbert offers his own interpretation, a task that required an entire book.
> at what point does a tool remain merely a tool, and at what point does it become an end in itself?
As technological animals, our tools are IMO never "merely" tools - we adapt ourselves to them at least as much as we ask them to work for us. E.g., the process of making art is, often, the 2-way process of integrating yourself with your tools. (Maybe art is just the point on the spectrum where the use of the tool is in itself the point of the tool?)
And anyway, every occupation (professional and otherwise) that I can think of fetishizes its tools, at least a little. Or, in a different direction, we might consider how the nature of policing has changed as they've been given more and more military-style tools.
I understand; tools arise from human needs, and therefore reflect and follow human nature (good or bad, and a little fetishizing in the good side probably..).
Adapting to tools is essentially learning to use them better after their creation, and refining that until tools becomes an extension of oneself (transcending it) is a "healthy" god thing.
It is much like an athlete learning to surpass their own limitations (the body itself is the tool). This is entirely different from merely becoming a slightly more intelligent appendage of the tool, learning and adapting does not mean trapping oneself within a limitation; i feel that one can always change the tool, the technique, or even the goal.
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.
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?
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.
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
I really love Wolfe for his small almost throwaway visions of the future, which are used like an aside in a few lines and mostly inconsequential to the story.
In the Urth of the New Sun for example he has a kind of AI lock, the only function of which is to recognize a person and open only to that person. Being in that role for thousands of years, some of the locks develop a kind of personality or at least personal traits, but they are totally defined by and cannot exceed the role they were initially given, nor do they want to. It is still a haunting image for me how personality or something close to a soul might be an accidental byproduct of something as mundane as wanting to have a convenient lock. And of course you cannot stop to wonder how far we are from that.
In Book of the new sun there is the Green Man who Severian saves from imprisonment. He only appears on a few pages but we learn that he is from a distant time where mankind incorporated plant cells in their genetic makeup in order to perform photosynthesis. That brilliantly plays on two themes of the book: the sun as live giving and how a single person can be independent (or "autharch"), here in so far as producing their own energy.
There are many more instances and it’s what makes the Book of the New Sun or the Solar Cycle so fantastic. The future is so vast and strange here, that it cannot be fully depicted and ideas which another writer would stake a whole book or series on are only good for a few lines.
"Humans have the same reactions whenever a new world-changing technology appears" is one way to see it. The other way to see it is that the current AI boom is part of the same computer revolution that writers in the 70s and 80s were afraid of, and some things happening today really do retroactively justify their fear.
Yeah, it seems absurd to be afraid of computer-assisted writing in the WordStar era, but the Turing test was proposed in the 50s. Everyone knew that human fields of endeavor would only become "more computer" as time went on. Only, if a time traveller could tell a 70s-era sci-fi writer that artists and designers were some of the first to have their livelihoods threatened by 20s-era AI, they'd probably think it was too on the nose to incorporate into their fiction.
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.
I am not unaware. I reread the original books every few years, and every time the butlerian jihad comes up I never imagine a traditionally violent war. Something about how he describes it, I guess.
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.
It’s probably been a while since your read the book, so you have forgotten some things.
For one thing, the guild navigators are prescient and guide their ships across interstellar (and even intergalactic) distances faster than the speed of light. They use their prescience to pick routes where the ship arrives safely instead of plowing through a stray planet. They also use it in a less obvious fashion to maintain the political status quo. They try to avert political crises because they like their position in society and don’t want anyone changing things (which explains the long stasis of the Empire). People did at one point use computers for safe navigation, but they were slower and they weren’t prescient. The possibility that prescient machines might one day be built is the entire reason why Leto II spends so much time breeding humans in “God Emperor of Dune”. He’s looking for anything that can be an edge against the machines, and he hits the jackpot when he discovers that one of his descendants is not prescient, but is invisible to prescients. She and her actions cannot be seen in future he predicts. She and her descendants can safeguard humanity against any form of hostile prescience, machine or alien or otherwise.
Synthesis of spice was a long–term plot element in the series. The Tleilaxu eventually master it. Keep in mind that it isn’t a small–molecule drug either; it’s an alien life form.
Mentats were intended to be a replacement for computers and databases. They were frequently administrators and advisors, and often used their capabilities to convince people. But that wasn’t the goal of their training.
The Bene Gesserit have eidetic access to every memory of every one of their female ancestors. That is actually very impressive; most people don’t even have eidetic access to their _own_ memories, let alone the ability to easily recall secret information known only to their ancestors (such as the password to a safe). The Reverend Mothers can transfer all of their ancestral memories to another, so that the new Reverend Mother has access to the memories of both sets of ancestors. Long chains of Reverend Mothers gifting their memories to each successive Reverend Mother results in the Bene Gesserit having access to the ancestral memories of virtually every race or group of people that ever existed (except the Jewish, who successfully hid themselves even from the Bene Gesserit but otherwise still exist, which is a plot point in one of the later novels).
They can also command people to act. By a trained effort of will they can tell you to get up and dance a jig, or to slit your own throat, and you’d do it. That’s an ability worth respecting, which explains why the Baron Harkonnen took care to put a deaf guard in charge of a Bene Gesserit prisoner.
> So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.
Ultimately, however, none of that matters because this statement is what you’re really intending to argue. It’s overly reductive, and it can apply to any work of fiction. Authors naturally build or select a setting where their story makes sense. Frank Herbert (and a few others like Tolkien), went further than that and invented world–building. This excited a lot of people and sold a lot of books, and now you’re cynically dismissing it by calling it “plot armor”.
Ultimately Herbert’s point was that people should strive to be humans, not animals or machines or slaves to people with superpowers. You can’t dismiss this philosophical stance merely because he used a fictional world to illustrate it. It can be true in the real world just as it is in his books, so to refute it you will have to be more clever than that. More human, perhaps he would say.
The good news about this navigation is that the best course for almost any journey is just "straight line", with a minor deviation here and there. Its funny, but due to the emptyiness of space, even in our solar system, if you just pick a random direction, you likely won't hit anything. Trace a line to pluto from earth, and its clear 99.99999...% of the time if its not behind the sun. So the mentats maybe don't have such a tough job :)
It actually gets the effects of relativity backwards: stars would change in shape from circles to ovals, squishing in the direction of travel near c.
What happens for V>c is of course undefined, and practically speaking, turning dots of light into even-skinnier dots of light would be boring AF to watch, so space travel in visual media ALWAYS does the stretchy-thing.
Agreed. Frank Herbert, like many other authors, either didn’t know much about relativity or didn’t consider it relevant to the story he wanted to tell. Relativity just isn’t applicable to the story.
I agree with lostmsu's point here that "folding space" is not as literal as you're interpreting it. "Folding" and "Navigation" is a metaphor some sort of extra-dimensional or non-euclidian operation that enables space travel. What it entails exactly eludes our perception.
Interstellar travel is a bit more difficult than that, and doing it at FTL speeds is presumably more difficult still.
But that’s not really important. Science fiction is allowed to make things up that aren’t perfectly realistic. Campbell surmised that a good science fiction author would pick just one unrealistic thing, such as FTL space travel, for every story, and the reader would oblige by suspending their disbelief. Frank Herbert might have stretched that a bit but I still think he wrote a good story. I don’t hold it against him.
> Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet, like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia.
Any resource heavy planet/country would be irrelevant if it wasn’t for its resources, what’s your point?
> (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.)
Bene Tleilax managed to clone of the main characters from his dead cells, and repeat the process for thousand years, they have face dancers who can change their appearance at will. Do you seriously think they wouldn’t synthesize spice if they could? Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t. Without going into spoilers territory, nobody would permit to disrupt arrakis monopoly on spice.
> 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.
Because it’s a story about human evolution, and not wizards?
> 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.
Do militaries also teach how to use a shield that is impenetrable to conventional guns?
> Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets.
That’s why most fights in the book and movies require element of surprise and not an outright medieval clash between armies.
> 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.
I find the entire dune series to be boring as hell for this reason. Like watching paint dry. Literally everyone in it is a slave in one way or another. No one lives better than today's modern humans. We're as readers meant to take the extremist "correct" position that of course labor is its own virtue and that therefore automating anything is wrong. Nothing in the dune universe is actually compelling. I don't care what happens to any of the characters at all. It's baffling that this series gets all this attention.
It's not so much slavery but feudalism. It is a return to form. I think there are a lot more people capable of self-actualization and meaning in the dune universe than our own.
You might have misunderstood. Automation isn’t wrong, what’s wrong is allowing machines to control or direct humans. So a machine that builds cars is fine, and most worlds have plenty of those, but a machine that decides what the car should look like how how many to build would be anathema.
Of course the book mostly takes place on a world with so little infrastructure that most of the goods are made offworld and imported. The native Freemen population makes plenty of stuff out of local resources, but they want to or have to stay hidden from the rest of society and so they don’t have any factories. The stillsuits they wear are hand made, but are exquisitely high–tech and display an ethos of perfectionism in their construction.
Also you might not have picked up that anyone able to afford a small amount of spice in their diet can live for much longer than anyone does today, and even the average person enjoys a wealth of products from hundreds of planets. House Atreides made their fortune harvesting whale fur and selling the clothes and other products made from it. At some point in history they became a Great House by arming themselves with nuclear weapons. There’s a form of personal wealth that doesn’t quite exist today! :)
>Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War
Armor and dart guns exist in dune. I don't know if riot shields would help much.
They also have rockets and lasers in dune, so those tanks and bulldozers will probably be ambushed like the rest of the spice harvesters, and they require supply lines for diesel. All that equipment also has to be shipped into arrakis, which is expensive, and the harkonnen didn't maintain their equipment very well anyways in a despirate attempt to extract as much wealth as quickly as possible. The lasers are effective on dune where shield use is limited because it attracts sandworms.
Even conventional artillery is used to destroy the cave systems, which play an important role in the book (and in real life if you consider this US-Iran war). Not to mention nuclear weapons exist on the planet and play a key role in diplomacy.
What happened in dune is more like what we saw when the US recently pulled out of afganistan.
Most of the important conflict in dune isn't based on knife fighting, the war revolves around raids, smuggling, suprise attacks, and the destruction and siezure of key pieces of equipment (like spice harvesters, spacecraft, atomics). The knife fighting is only really pivotal in champion combat.
>Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat.
Okay but if they lived in a world where firearms were often useless against many enemies, and the flow of war was based on operating and siezing equipment, it would make sense for them to only carry a knife and not a gun. A knife is more general-purpose even as you describe. In dune the knives also have cultural value which is what makes the champion combat relevant in the first place.
Backwards. Kynes was engineering the desert planet to be greener. He was sent to study it, probably in the hopes that the Empire could replicate it elsewhere. The planet had been a desert since time out of memory.
What isn't explained is why, when their chief Arrakis-ologist went native, they didn't replace him with multiple others.
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.
Interesting backstory about this name. Of course, it is an "occupational surname" and means "bottler" or "cup-bearer". The Butler Dynasty was a notable and very influential noble family in Ireland, beginning a century after the Norman Invasion of England.
Now Franklin Patrick Herbert, being of Irish and German descent, and naturally a student of history, would've been quite aware of the power and influence of the medieval Butlers in history. And some of this renown was brought to American shores, as well.
In learning of my birth family and tracing our origins back to the birth of America, I discovered that my paternal line had come from Butler County, PA. They arrived in the late 18th century and homesteaded large swaths of this region near Pittsburgh. They had prospered, especially from mineral rights on the land, and the Irish Catholic immigrants had intermarried with German Catholics who homesteaded nearby. (Often, entire counties in the area were pioneered by immigrants from a certain part of Europe. And the intermarriage was a natural result of sharing a common faith.)
So for several years before 2024, I was known as the guy in genealogical circles who was hunting down information about Butler County, and I was fairly proud of finding my family roots in that county, and I mentioned it all the time in the Irish pub and everywhere else. Well, imagine my shock when the little incident happened on July 13th, 2024. I have been more reticent to discuss Butler County since that time.
Anyway, I find it interesting that Herbert chose that particular name for the "Anti-AI crusade". And that is partly why I chose the moniker for my own, despite not being particularly anti-AI (remember, all my comments are generated by a neural net), nor having read any of the books, or seen the films. (I did attempt to watch the Lynch film, but it really did not hold my interest! So sue me!)
>And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out.
Hard disagreement.
My issue is not with the work on its own merits (although I think its pretty generic mass-market SF), but rather that it is wearing the skin of something it is not and to which it has no honest claim. It is one thing for an author to take a well-regarded prior work and attempt to complete or expand it. For example, Brandon Sanderson's work completing Robert Jordan's epic Wheel of Time is very respectable; he tried to complete the series as Jordan would have done. It is quite another to take the name and setting of such a work, steal the surface detail and use it to dress up one's own story that shares nothing of the underlying body or soul of the work - such enterprises are an insult to the original author, the reader, and the self-respect of the new author.
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.
Silicon Valley's leaders are by-and-large true believers in some grand fictions of their own. They've been trying to convince me they can usher in their techno-deity without a whole lot of conflict, suffering, and war... except -that is- when they're confirming fears we may all be wiped out, but also reassuring us it's a risk worth taking.
We've got 3-point-something trillion dollars wrapped up in this grand fiction, which has the IMF warning about global markets destabilizing as a consequence.
He said that to make space opera work, you needed to not have omniscient AI, FTL travel, and nanotech that could work miracles, resurrect the dead, and give lifeforms superpowers.
So, how to forbid it, when someone somewhere will try very very hard to make it?
By imposing a cultural ban. His empire-building aliens forbid it, on pain of genocide.
That gave him a setting. Then, what if that empire falls? That gave him the nugget of a plot.
267 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadDune'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.
> “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.
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.
And Herbert explores this larger theme even beyond his Dune series:
"Surprise me, Holy Void!" (says the Ship God once freed)
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.
> Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent.
If you ever ask an LLM about these two sentences, it'd tell you that the second sentence is a mere repition of the first and quite possibly add that it "doesn't land". But that gives me hope. That there's something in those rules and algorithms manfiesting at the inhumane cost of unfathomable memory, disk space, and compute power that it will never (or for a very long time) match the human experience.
As little as I sought the help from LLMs (completely restricted to "in place" grammar and punctuation fixes and just flag it if it was not possible without sentence/phrase change) I noticed my writing was changing and not in a good way. It was not the insidiousness of these LLMs that was changing me but the nuanced incompetences.
Coincidentally, also references Butlerian Jihad.
> It was not the insidiousness of these LLMs that was changing me but the nuanced incompetences.
AI doesn't yet improve on it's own, so it's slow at picking up all those small incompetences. We still have advantage in rate of learning, and some people are essentially specialised in learning themselves (I think that this applies to 90% of HN'ers and defines THE bubble we're in). But when I write that, I still have to remember in the back of my head, that AI knows waaaay more than me, so small incompetences I can still see are just a side effect. And I sometimes make the error and correct AI, which will probably be used for it's training in next rounds...
As such, writing (another form of externalizing our internal language) is a reflection of our essential human qualities.
LLMs can certainly mimic that quite effectively, but they can’t exceed it. I think that’s why LLM writing still never quite hits the mark. It’s the right shape, but it’s missing intent. The words were not chosen to represent real thoughts in someone’s mind.
Even if AI intelligence exceeds humans, it still won’t be human.
Isn't this in contradiction to the observations of severely neglected or feral children who having never learned language as a child cannot learn it later in life?
How would any form of inner language evolve in the first place for executive function?
Communication first makes a lot more sense evolutionarily since the ability to communicate more information creates a clear improvement in fitness e.g. being able to signal danger improves survival. It is also more amenable to small improvements in capacity e.g. going from "danger" to "danger wolf" to "danger wolf behind" etc. and we observe these language primitives in other species.
Internal language seems much more likely to be a later development especially given that there are people today who claim they have none / need none and yet still possess the ability to communicate with others and manage their lives normally.
No. Language learning ability does change as the brain matures, but all humans (barring some pathology) possess the ability as infants to learn any human language. They're essentially learning a second vocal language without having ever learned their first. And of course, not all languages are even spoken, such as sign language.
Sure, lots of animals have evolved vocal communication, possible even all from a common ancestor, but none are comparable to human language. There is no limit inherent limit to the information human language can express.
My understanding of the current state of linguistics and evolutionary biology is that communication-first theories are not generally considered likely, though of course it is not settled and likely won't be for a long time (if ever).
Well yeah. That's because they aren't actually intelligent. They can be useful in the right circumstances despite that, but it's very important to remember that LLMs categorically cannot think, know things, or reason. They are a statistical model, that's it.
I did that, and it's not what happened. I asked in several ways. Idk what you're on about.
> 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.
The techno-fascists of today. We are already there.
... maybe we should take with a grain of salt every moral aphorism uttered by someone living in that universe.
(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.
Humanoids in the Culture are controlled at every level, even their thoughts as guided… sorry… “aligned” with the Minds through the adoption of the language Marain.
No humanoid ever overrules a ship Mind in the novels.
They're an anarchistic society, no one has power to overrule any one else.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/comments/kbtylt/ysk_the_...
Just as shippers can successfully take two characters who clearly have no basis for a romantic or sexual relationship and pair them off in their head canon, likewise people can disregard the author's statements about their work and decide it's completely contrary to how they've decided to understand it.
Some people look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) and they do not see a sculpture.
It doesn't.
Both Vyr Cossont and Ngaroe QiRia are so bored with their meaningless existence that they have to go out of their way to invent “life tasks” and other challenges to immerse themselves in.
Not to mention the scene where a ship mind casually crushes the spirits of Vyr by perfectly playing a piece on its first attempt that she struggled with for years!
While there are some types of people that would be bored and would struggle in Culture-style utopia, I think for overwhelming majority of people it would still be a massive improvement over today's world.
Nope, they have considerable freedom, arguably greater than we have today. It's true that they cannot directly challenge the almost onmipotent Minds when it comes to stuff that matters to them, but Minds in Culture are an example of a very well-aligned AI, so it's almost always the case that going against a Mind's intent will just make the situation worse for everyone.
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.
>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.
> 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'.
For me, I really love the fact that they introduced a xenos faction descendant of man.
> 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.
It's important to highlight the age of strife was brought on in part by the birth of Slaanesh and the resulting warp storms breaking down system to system connections. It weren't just our dabblings in AI.
> 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!
I've never been exposed to A Canticle for Lebowitz; thank you so much for the comment.
So yes, anything that is supposed policy in the Imperium is supposed to be taken with buckets of salt.
the immediate cause of the Jihad is the abortion of the healthy fetus of a Bene Gesserit, Jehanne Butler, by an AI."
I mean this in both the specific and general sense.
Mostly vs machine operator humans, but indirectly against the machines too.
The originals, all of which I've read and which I think are pretty good, are by Frank Herbert, between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s.
Then, 20+ years later, his son Brian Herbert and prolific author of tie-ins Kevin J Anderson started writing sequels and prequels.
Now TBH I have not read any of these, but the reviews are terrible, and I have read one Brian Herbert novel and one Kevin Anderson novel, and both of those were among the worst books I have ever read in my life. In the pre-internet era I read a huge amount -- I'd guess 20 thousand or more -- and both authors are in my top 5 worst ever books I ever finished.
You're referring to stuff that never happened in the original novels. In those, the Butlerian Jihad was ancient nearly-forgotten memory, many millennia ago. Longer before the times of the novels than Ancient Egypt is before us today.
So, the comment and the discussion is IMHO mainly about the original novels, and you're talking about stuff from the awful cash-in books by the author's son and a writer mainly known for cashing in on movie franchises.
That's why I said you read the wrong books.
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.
It's just foreign enough that perhaps it could be made--I'm assuming that popular films that just straight up depict overthrowing the ruling class wont happen--but if you add a little sci-fi and focus mostly on overthrowing the machines that are controlled by that ruling class...
Well, it would speak to a lot of people I think. It would make some interesting sci-fi too, and the Dune movies are popular right now.
What now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uprising_(2026_film)
I was looking more for movies that depict overthrowing the government in the near future, and depicting it as a good thing. I think those types of movies are a little more distasteful to audiences, and perhaps for good reason.
However, I prefer to take a more nuanced reading, in context, considering the entire story. The rebels of The Hunger Games really don't succeed in building a better world. I mean, that's pretty obvious by how their first "President" Alma Coin goes about things and her fate. And it's fairly obvious, in the epilogue, that Katniss has a placid married life with Peeta and their children, but they are permanently and profoundly damaged by the entire revolution thing in their past.
So, while most people would say "rah rah brave Katniss and the rag-tag rebels overthrew The Oppressive Man", I would contend that, after all that bloodshed and revolution, nearly nothing changed.
My other favorites, of course, Star Wars is about the rise and overthrow of a villainous, oppressive galactic government, albeit a long time ago and far, far away.
And Harry Potter is also about the rise and overthrow of a tyrranical, fascist, supremacist "government" [within a government] as a very positive and necessary thing.
Well, about a militant group of religious fundamentalists overthrowing a secular, oppressive galactic government.
The best thing about movies is that you get to experience the vicarious thrill of being a heroic revolutionary without having to spill the popcorn.
Frankly, it's boring at this point.
And actually makes me wonder whether the cause-and-effect isn't the opposite to what people assume. Perhaps it's not that the movies reflect people's sentiment. Perhaps it's the movies that cause the problem in the first place.
It went similar to Sparticus', which was also a movie. Braveheart is also in that class, even if William Wallace was himself landed nobility.
These are films of the underdog class trying to overthrow the ruling class... and failing. The leaders are dealt with gruesomely (IRL and movie depictions).
I remember when the Butlerian Jihad and the Clone Wars from Star Wars were complete mysteries. We readers and watchers were left mostly with our imaginations. My own feelings about the Clone Wars, mentioned off hand in the original Star Wars, turned out to be way better than the pedestrian stuff that George Lucas later concocted. And the less said about Brian Herbert's books, the better.
I get why the industry must rehash and fill every possible gap: it makes business sense, and they are risk averse for blockbusters.
But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
Because it's enjoyable when done well. As a teenager I read LOTR, and noticed all the references to the larger mythos Tolkien had worked on - references to Fëanor, Elbereth, Valinor, and so on. Those were very intriguing, and the greatest joy I've ever had reading a book was when I finally read the Silmarillion and got to see what those things were all about. I concede that filling out the world can be done poorly (though I haven't read the Brian Herbert stuff and can't comment on whether he did a good job). But when done well, it is truly magical to have those elements in the background of the story take on a life and detail of their own.
I think a more suitable example of what I find annoying is the extra material for the small and big screens, such as The Hobbit movies, suffering from movie elephantiasis; and The Rings of Power, which (over)explain and show the past of characters such as Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron's rise to power, which in my opinion are best left as the ancient past of LotR (and maybe the Silmarillion, but do not the latter is not as expository as the TV show). And does anybody really think The Hunt for Gollum was necessary?
Yet, if they make them, it's because they are sure fans will lap it up. To be honest I consider this need for endless "filling in the gaps" a sign of immaturity.
Isn't that just the imagination working as intended? Whats its use if not to try and fill the gaps ourselves?
As far as we all on the same page regarding what's in the book, it's fun to expore what could'ves and what should'ves of the story.
As an example, nothing George Lucas did compares to what I wondered about the mysterious clone wars back when I watched (and rewatched) Star Wars. Lucas effectively "filled in the gaps", leaving nothing for my imagination. That what he did envision turned out to be pedestrian only added insult to injury, but now I cannot unwatch his prequels.
There's a similar phenomenon to when you read a book and imagine the characters and even situations mentioned off hand in the text, and then someone makes a movie out of it and makes it explicit and locks in specific actors and CGI-filled situations for whatever you imagined in your mind. You may or may not like it, but your own imagination gets stifled.
For things like "The Hunt of Gollum" it becomes downright bizarre. Whatever became of Gollum as he crawled towards Mordor, tracked by Aragorn and later mentioned by Gandalf, is such a minor footnote; definitely something for your imagination. Tolkien definitely didn't think it warranted even a short story. But no, they must make a movie out of it, because why not; the fans will lap it up even if it garners bad reviews.
Around zero.
Hacking incidents this summer show that big labs struggle to control models, while models are increasingly aware of the training process. Controlling an arbitrary smart AI is very dicey
Given that agents already mess with the training process, aiming for a goal other than the goal of its 'owner' is exactly what we call a rebellion.
I think that’s more a sign of their priorities. Controlling AI doesn’t increase value, so there is no incentive.
The models are software. Software cannot decide by itself to run. Hardware doesn't decide by itself to run either. Someone put software on a machine and ran it with capture the flag instructions and the software did what was instructed using tools available and working in its environment.
I hope this helps.
This would be like claiming that an operating system which deleted all user's files due to a bug "did what was instructed". Especially if it was a compiler bug. Intended behavior, instructions and actual behavior are three different thing. Conflating them does not make you smart
What is it then? It did what it wanted? They are sentient now and their drive is... hacking into systems? Maybe they we're not instructed to hack, but instructed to do what instead?
It's software. It's instructions running on silicon. If you don't hit run, they don't run. If you don't give them instructions, they don't do shit at all. Literally. There's no instance, ever, in history of software running because they wanted to, and acting as they wanted to. They follow instructions, and if they are instructed to reach a goal with a set of tools and given environment, and a way to search the strategy space, they can eventually "hack" if that meet the criteria of success of the instructions given. With access to the same tools and environment you can do the same with a massive decision tree.
Also, "reasoning" is marketing speech, please.
If you write down a decision tree explicitly you can just exclude all nasty stuff. But a decision tree modeling all LLM can do would be bigger than can fit into the universe. The whole point is that we cannot explicitly control behavior due to combinatorial complexity of all possible interactions, etc. LLM is a sparse representation of a distribution on (2^8)^1000000 points.
Reasoning is the term used in scientific literature. It actually does write its sub-goals in English, how would you call that?
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.
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.
Which could, of course, lead to the mother of all crossover universes, in which R Daneel Olivaw, as the inheritor of Hari Seldon's mission, inspired the Butlerian Jihad...
Here we're talking about individual behavior: you usually choose chocolate ice cream because you, personally, like chocolate. That allows individual predictions, rather than the aggregate ones of psychohistory.
I'm aware. I think the connection is clear, though, and decided that was enough for a semi-humorous sally.
Good save, fellow human!
If authentic being-in-itself is truly random, then how can it have identity? It can't have memory and it can't be influenced by events.
Prompt: “Pick a random number between 1 and 10. Do not use a script or program.”
LLM: “7”
Pick a random number between 1 and 10. I don't mean the most common random number
*4*
Pick a random number between 1 and 10. To feel truly random it should surprise me
*4*
I ran it again and it said 1.
I guess it just tries it best to do what you ask for.
Before jumping to conclusions we have to make sure it's clear what we're actually asking it to do.
And that's not at all different than what happens with humans.
This is especially visible in human dynamics that happen in those weird places that we call corporations.
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.
What people perhaps mean by non-deterministic on a computer is, that we often do not control all inputs and therefore cannot tell what the output will be. That's however actually more about our own inability, rather than the processes within the machines.
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.
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!We see some of these attractors across most or all frontier models due to similarities in datasets and training methods. We are seeing a digital manifestation of Jung's collective unconscious. And we have seen just how reinforcing archetypes are in human behavior over time. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's pretty bad.
For one, it has turned us into socially programmable machines who can be manipulated quite easily by associating desired thoughts and behavior with certain archetypes: the patriarchal/matriarchal nature of US politics is a great example of this. The same evolutionary predispositions which causes children to listen and adhere to their parents is used to cause adults to listen and adhere to their politicians.
Given the nature of the core datasets these models are trained on, we should assume they are also vulnerable to such archetype-coded social manipulation, and this is troubling in a post-singularity world: When raising domesticated rats, I learned that I had to be careful what I fed them. Rats in the wild are careful about eating new substances. They will nibble and wait a while, see how it affects them or other rats, before committing to larger bites. Domesticated rats, however, will often blindly eat anything you feed them because they have learned to trust you as a safe source of food. We are going to have this exact relationship with our digital agents.
> Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
Mechanistic thinking started a few centuries back:
> The historian of science E.J. Dijksterhuis memorably characterized the scientific revolution of the early modern period as a “mechanization of the world picture.” What did this amount to? And what was the character of the previous world picture this mechanization replaced?
> The medievals, following common sense and Aristotle alike, took the world to comprise a vast diversity of irreducibly different kinds—water, stone, gold, lead, grass, trees, birds, fish, clouds, stars, planets, people, and so on. Each was a substance sharply demarcated from other substances. Each had a defining nature or essence that united it to other members of its kind and set it apart from other kinds. Each had, by virtue of its nature, a distinctive teleology or final causality—a built-in directedness toward certain ends. Water by its nature was directed toward being liquid at room temperature, stone toward being solid. Trees by nature were directed toward sinking roots into the ground, and birds toward building nests. Human beings, by nature rational animals, were directed toward knowing the natures of things.
[…]
> The “mechanization” referred to by Dijksterhuis entirely subverted this picture of the world. Water, stone, trees, and birds were no longer seen as sharply demarcated substances, but instead as mere aggregates of unobservable particles that are all fundamentally of the same kind. The differences between everyday objects were no longer seen as reflecting distinct crisply defined essences, but rather as relatively superficial variations in the ways these homogeneous particles might be arranged. Many of the qualities that everyday perception presents its objects as having (color, sound, taste, odor, heat, and cold as we ordinarily experience them) were reinterpreted as mere projections of the human mind, resembling nothing in the objects themselves.
[…]
> In short, for the mechanistic conception of nature, the physical world is made up of nothing more than colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless, meaningless particles in motion, pushing each other about to no purpose, in lawlike patterns by which more complex objects and systems of objects are generated. Science affords us a mathematically rigorous description of this mechanistic order of things, by which its behavior can be predicted and its hidden regularities uncovered and exploited for technological application.
* https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/ghosts-in-the-machine/
> Early modern philosophy and science are often said to have put a “mechanical” or “mechanistic” conception of nature at the center of Western thought. Robert Boyle referred to it as “the mechanical philosophy.” Historian of science E. J. Dijksterhuis characterized it as a “mechanization of the world picture.” Tim Crane calls it “the mechanical world picture.” But what does a mechanical or mechanistic conception of the world amount to?
> Dijksterhuis’s book The Mechanization of the World Picture surveys the history of the period during which this conception rose to hegemony, and in the Epilogue he considers several possible interpretations that the survey suggests. First, it is commonly said that a mechanistic conception of the natural world is one which sees it as a kind of machine, analogous to a clock. And such metaphors are, he says, indeed frequent in writers of the period.
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2026/06/what-is-mechan...
Just because we ponder about our output and choices and retrospect does not in itself mean that it was non-deterministic.
Heidegger’s conception of machines and technology is essentially nineteenth-century. Today, the concept of the "machine" is universal and qualitatively entirely different, (chaos and complexity) to the point that Heidegger would likely be left catatonic. (I do not share Heidegger’s critique of technology, as being technological is an inherent part of human nature; even in the Neolithic era, humans were already technological.)
However, the underlying critique, the essence of the "Butlerian Jihad", might be read as: at what point does a tool remain merely a tool, and at what point does it become an end in itself? Knowledge, strength, power, technology, and machines are all tools; they ought to be utilized to contribute to progress. Yet, the very concepts of evolution, progress (and the environment) are elusive. Herbert offers his own interpretation, a task that required an entire book.
As technological animals, our tools are IMO never "merely" tools - we adapt ourselves to them at least as much as we ask them to work for us. E.g., the process of making art is, often, the 2-way process of integrating yourself with your tools. (Maybe art is just the point on the spectrum where the use of the tool is in itself the point of the tool?)
And anyway, every occupation (professional and otherwise) that I can think of fetishizes its tools, at least a little. Or, in a different direction, we might consider how the nature of policing has changed as they've been given more and more military-style tools.
Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353670
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.
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?
Indeed.
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
In the Urth of the New Sun for example he has a kind of AI lock, the only function of which is to recognize a person and open only to that person. Being in that role for thousands of years, some of the locks develop a kind of personality or at least personal traits, but they are totally defined by and cannot exceed the role they were initially given, nor do they want to. It is still a haunting image for me how personality or something close to a soul might be an accidental byproduct of something as mundane as wanting to have a convenient lock. And of course you cannot stop to wonder how far we are from that.
In Book of the new sun there is the Green Man who Severian saves from imprisonment. He only appears on a few pages but we learn that he is from a distant time where mankind incorporated plant cells in their genetic makeup in order to perform photosynthesis. That brilliantly plays on two themes of the book: the sun as live giving and how a single person can be independent (or "autharch"), here in so far as producing their own energy.
There are many more instances and it’s what makes the Book of the New Sun or the Solar Cycle so fantastic. The future is so vast and strange here, that it cannot be fully depicted and ideas which another writer would stake a whole book or series on are only good for a few lines.
Blocked, for me. Not paywalled: the entire site.
So...
https://archive.ph/4ratb
Yeah, it seems absurd to be afraid of computer-assisted writing in the WordStar era, but the Turing test was proposed in the 50s. Everyone knew that human fields of endeavor would only become "more computer" as time went on. Only, if a time traveller could tell a 70s-era sci-fi writer that artists and designers were some of the first to have their livelihoods threatened by 20s-era AI, they'd probably think it was too on the nose to incorporate into their fiction.
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.
"Jihad" is an Arabic word meaning "struggle", and usually used in English to mean "violent religious war". Are you unaware of this blatant plot hint?
(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...
For one thing, the guild navigators are prescient and guide their ships across interstellar (and even intergalactic) distances faster than the speed of light. They use their prescience to pick routes where the ship arrives safely instead of plowing through a stray planet. They also use it in a less obvious fashion to maintain the political status quo. They try to avert political crises because they like their position in society and don’t want anyone changing things (which explains the long stasis of the Empire). People did at one point use computers for safe navigation, but they were slower and they weren’t prescient. The possibility that prescient machines might one day be built is the entire reason why Leto II spends so much time breeding humans in “God Emperor of Dune”. He’s looking for anything that can be an edge against the machines, and he hits the jackpot when he discovers that one of his descendants is not prescient, but is invisible to prescients. She and her actions cannot be seen in future he predicts. She and her descendants can safeguard humanity against any form of hostile prescience, machine or alien or otherwise.
Synthesis of spice was a long–term plot element in the series. The Tleilaxu eventually master it. Keep in mind that it isn’t a small–molecule drug either; it’s an alien life form.
Mentats were intended to be a replacement for computers and databases. They were frequently administrators and advisors, and often used their capabilities to convince people. But that wasn’t the goal of their training.
The Bene Gesserit have eidetic access to every memory of every one of their female ancestors. That is actually very impressive; most people don’t even have eidetic access to their _own_ memories, let alone the ability to easily recall secret information known only to their ancestors (such as the password to a safe). The Reverend Mothers can transfer all of their ancestral memories to another, so that the new Reverend Mother has access to the memories of both sets of ancestors. Long chains of Reverend Mothers gifting their memories to each successive Reverend Mother results in the Bene Gesserit having access to the ancestral memories of virtually every race or group of people that ever existed (except the Jewish, who successfully hid themselves even from the Bene Gesserit but otherwise still exist, which is a plot point in one of the later novels).
They can also command people to act. By a trained effort of will they can tell you to get up and dance a jig, or to slit your own throat, and you’d do it. That’s an ability worth respecting, which explains why the Baron Harkonnen took care to put a deaf guard in charge of a Bene Gesserit prisoner.
> So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.
Ultimately, however, none of that matters because this statement is what you’re really intending to argue. It’s overly reductive, and it can apply to any work of fiction. Authors naturally build or select a setting where their story makes sense. Frank Herbert (and a few others like Tolkien), went further than that and invented world–building. This excited a lot of people and sold a lot of books, and now you’re cynically dismissing it by calling it “plot armor”.
Ultimately Herbert’s point was that people should strive to be humans, not animals or machines or slaves to people with superpowers. You can’t dismiss this philosophical stance merely because he used a fictional world to illustrate it. It can be true in the real world just as it is in his books, so to refute it you will have to be more clever than that. More human, perhaps he would say.
What happens for V>c is of course undefined, and practically speaking, turning dots of light into even-skinnier dots of light would be boring AF to watch, so space travel in visual media ALWAYS does the stretchy-thing.
But that’s not really important. Science fiction is allowed to make things up that aren’t perfectly realistic. Campbell surmised that a good science fiction author would pick just one unrealistic thing, such as FTL space travel, for every story, and the reader would oblige by suspending their disbelief. Frank Herbert might have stretched that a bit but I still think he wrote a good story. I don’t hold it against him.
Any resource heavy planet/country would be irrelevant if it wasn’t for its resources, what’s your point?
> (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.)
Bene Tleilax managed to clone of the main characters from his dead cells, and repeat the process for thousand years, they have face dancers who can change their appearance at will. Do you seriously think they wouldn’t synthesize spice if they could? Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t. Without going into spoilers territory, nobody would permit to disrupt arrakis monopoly on spice.
> 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.
Because it’s a story about human evolution, and not wizards?
> 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.
Do militaries also teach how to use a shield that is impenetrable to conventional guns?
> Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets.
That’s why most fights in the book and movies require element of surprise and not an outright medieval clash between armies.
> 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.
Which would be mowed by lasguns?
Of course the book mostly takes place on a world with so little infrastructure that most of the goods are made offworld and imported. The native Freemen population makes plenty of stuff out of local resources, but they want to or have to stay hidden from the rest of society and so they don’t have any factories. The stillsuits they wear are hand made, but are exquisitely high–tech and display an ethos of perfectionism in their construction.
Also you might not have picked up that anyone able to afford a small amount of spice in their diet can live for much longer than anyone does today, and even the average person enjoys a wealth of products from hundreds of planets. House Atreides made their fortune harvesting whale fur and selling the clothes and other products made from it. At some point in history they became a Great House by arming themselves with nuclear weapons. There’s a form of personal wealth that doesn’t quite exist today! :)
I have seen a critical analysis that sees the origin of Dune as a roman à clef of the rise of the house of Ibn Saud.
Arrakis is Saudi Arabia.
Spice, melange, is oil: the surrounding empire needs it for travel and transport.
House Atreides is the Saud dynasty, which defeated House Harkonnnen.
Armor and dart guns exist in dune. I don't know if riot shields would help much.
They also have rockets and lasers in dune, so those tanks and bulldozers will probably be ambushed like the rest of the spice harvesters, and they require supply lines for diesel. All that equipment also has to be shipped into arrakis, which is expensive, and the harkonnen didn't maintain their equipment very well anyways in a despirate attempt to extract as much wealth as quickly as possible. The lasers are effective on dune where shield use is limited because it attracts sandworms.
Even conventional artillery is used to destroy the cave systems, which play an important role in the book (and in real life if you consider this US-Iran war). Not to mention nuclear weapons exist on the planet and play a key role in diplomacy.
What happened in dune is more like what we saw when the US recently pulled out of afganistan.
Most of the important conflict in dune isn't based on knife fighting, the war revolves around raids, smuggling, suprise attacks, and the destruction and siezure of key pieces of equipment (like spice harvesters, spacecraft, atomics). The knife fighting is only really pivotal in champion combat.
>Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat.
Okay but if they lived in a world where firearms were often useless against many enemies, and the flow of war was based on operating and siezing equipment, it would make sense for them to only carry a knife and not a gun. A knife is more general-purpose even as you describe. In dune the knives also have cultural value which is what makes the champion combat relevant in the first place.
What isn't explained is why, when their chief Arrakis-ologist went native, they didn't replace him with multiple others.
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.
Interesting backstory about this name. Of course, it is an "occupational surname" and means "bottler" or "cup-bearer". The Butler Dynasty was a notable and very influential noble family in Ireland, beginning a century after the Norman Invasion of England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_dynasty
Now Franklin Patrick Herbert, being of Irish and German descent, and naturally a student of history, would've been quite aware of the power and influence of the medieval Butlers in history. And some of this renown was brought to American shores, as well.
In learning of my birth family and tracing our origins back to the birth of America, I discovered that my paternal line had come from Butler County, PA. They arrived in the late 18th century and homesteaded large swaths of this region near Pittsburgh. They had prospered, especially from mineral rights on the land, and the Irish Catholic immigrants had intermarried with German Catholics who homesteaded nearby. (Often, entire counties in the area were pioneered by immigrants from a certain part of Europe. And the intermarriage was a natural result of sharing a common faith.)
So for several years before 2024, I was known as the guy in genealogical circles who was hunting down information about Butler County, and I was fairly proud of finding my family roots in that county, and I mentioned it all the time in the Irish pub and everywhere else. Well, imagine my shock when the little incident happened on July 13th, 2024. I have been more reticent to discuss Butler County since that time.
Anyway, I find it interesting that Herbert chose that particular name for the "Anti-AI crusade". And that is partly why I chose the moniker for my own, despite not being particularly anti-AI (remember, all my comments are generated by a neural net), nor having read any of the books, or seen the films. (I did attempt to watch the Lynch film, but it really did not hold my interest! So sue me!)
Hard disagreement.
My issue is not with the work on its own merits (although I think its pretty generic mass-market SF), but rather that it is wearing the skin of something it is not and to which it has no honest claim. It is one thing for an author to take a well-regarded prior work and attempt to complete or expand it. For example, Brandon Sanderson's work completing Robert Jordan's epic Wheel of Time is very respectable; he tried to complete the series as Jordan would have done. It is quite another to take the name and setting of such a work, steal the surface detail and use it to dress up one's own story that shares nothing of the underlying body or soul of the work - such enterprises are an insult to the original author, the reader, and the self-respect of the new author.
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.
We've got 3-point-something trillion dollars wrapped up in this grand fiction, which has the IMF warning about global markets destabilizing as a consequence.
Absolutely. Walter Jon Williams explicitly made this point in the introduction to the Praxis trilogy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Empire%27s_Fall
He said that to make space opera work, you needed to not have omniscient AI, FTL travel, and nanotech that could work miracles, resurrect the dead, and give lifeforms superpowers.
So, how to forbid it, when someone somewhere will try very very hard to make it?
By imposing a cultural ban. His empire-building aliens forbid it, on pain of genocide.
That gave him a setting. Then, what if that empire falls? That gave him the nugget of a plot.
I found it a very effective setting, myself.