I love this piece of writing for so many reasons that I'm having trouble articulating them. So here are a few random thoughts:
1. You really would make an excellent book or film critic. The way you unraveled all the threads in Dune has convinced me I need to read the series.
2. I find this point of view--that our true holy war is against the human instinct for domination, not against AI or any specific technology--to be weirdly reassuring. There has always been someone who has been trying to restructure society in order to dominate their fellow men, so this is an old struggle with an old enemy. We're fighting in familiar territory.
3. "We must struggle against the part of ourselves that wants to surrender our judgment, our care, our conflict, and our humanity to the machines." I would love to hear more about this. What are some things we can do as individuals to win the war of our own Greater Jihad? Some things that spring to mind are: educate ourselves on history and the human experience, consume art (like Dune, for example) that inspires critical thought and empathy, and surround ourselves with people who challenge our ideas so that we don't become complacent in our judgment.
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.
Maybe it’s not within the scope of this essay but the authors’ beliefs on how much
AI should be embraced seems fuzzy here. Because there is nothing explicitly saying “No AI for any reason”, should I assume like other commenters that the argument is to decentralize AI control and creation and personally each of us decide how to use it in ways that doesn’t substitute for our own reasoning, creative pursuits, communicative abilities etc.?
Not exactly decentralize to that extent, but largely to bring the development of new technology under the reign of the collective in as broadly democratic a way as possible. This has happened somewhat organically in regard to data centers
I thoroughly enjoyed your analysis, thank you! I loved the Frank Hebert books. I do plan to read the Butlerian Jihad, even though Brian authored it. I know he pulled from Franks notes, so I just want to give it a chance despite having heard Brian is a real let down in comparison to his dad as an author of this storyline.
Is a real solution in our timeline a push towards decentralized ownership and decentralization in general? Similar to the outcome of the scattering?
Leto II forced humanity into thousands of years of tyrant oppression to force home a lesson. Does he not simply villainize prescience as a ruling authority, which became the central authority after the old Imperium fell?
Human, worm, machine, or other domination even in the pursuit of peace is a miserable experience for humanity. Centralization is the core of these dominating systems. We allow a centralized belief system to overcome our minds as individuals which is essentially giving up thinking to a centralized system, no matter what form. Genetics, religion, prescience, technology, historical precedence, military strength… we must hold space for multiple conflicting belief systems both intellectually as individuals and politically as humanity.
I personally believe that love is an attractive force in the universe that we as humans have evolved to feel emotionally because attraction is what creates life on both the subatomic and cosmological scales. Love and gravity are interlinked, although I am not exactly sure how. Perhaps gravity is a physical expression of the force of attraction and love is a metaphysical/emotional/ethereal expression of that same force of attraction that counters entropy.
In a lot of ways, my personal belief system distills into “love is life and fear is death”. Frank also hints at this in Heretics and Chapterhouse with Odrade and Marbella. Humanity without love is destined for extinction on a long enough time horizon. No matter how strategic, logical, or prescient our centralized authorities are when they steer humanity in exclusion of love.
The Butlerian Jihad always fascinates me in relation to our current timeline. We seem to be racing towards the timeline where the Butlerian Jihad exists. Our centralized authorities worldwide are almost pathologically committed to misdirecting the path of AI utilization on behalf of humanity.
I could chat forever about Dune… to end this long winded comment…
What do you think of the face-dancers trying to capture Duncan with the “net” at the end of Chapterhouse? That took things to another level for me that was difficult to wrap my mind around, but very intriguing nonetheless.
Brilliant piece as always. Especially important to consider in an age where the likes of Altman are suggesting he is aiming to make 'intelligence' a resource like water or energy and others implying they are the most pure arbiters of truth we have managed so far. They really want us to outsource our thoughts and decision-making capacity to their machines so we can unburden ourselves of agency ...
I see your basic argument that AI is not inherently bad, and that Butlerian Jihad itself was not anti-AI but against the Oligarchy that controlled the AI. That AI itself is no deadlier than a loaded gun on the table, and that its the finger that pulls the trigger that's evil.
However, I do not agree with it. Nor do I think that Frank himself would agree. To use the two major quotes:
1) “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.”
2) “The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments.”
Both quotes target giving up thinking. The first one is explicit. The second, especially in the context of surrounding text, is about humanities willingness to give up their thinking as the definition of "machine-attitude". So the second reads more as: "the target of the Jihad was humanities willingness to sacrifice its thinking to the machines as the machines themselves."
To say that the parable of the Butlerian Jihad isn't that AI is evil just the masters of AI are evil is the exact same as saying Paul himself wasn't evil just the Bene Gesserit are. The entirety of Dune is verified to be about the dangers of a population when they give up thinking. With Paul, it is give up thinking to a charismatic leader. In the Butlerian Jihad is was to machines.
While you yourself did not explicitly make the loaded gun comparison, it was definitely implied. But the difference between a loaded gun and AI is everyone knows the dangers of a loaded gun. The dangers of AI, while heavily documented back to the onset of Google and the adverse effects of online search engines on memory attention (aka, giving up thinking to the machines) are not heavily known, constantly rebuked when brought up, and take an insidiously long time to take effect and thus easy to dismiss.
"But guns are a weapon and AI is a tool!" Is the typical response to that comparison. Many would argue that guns are tools. Still more would argue that AI is a weapon, which is exactly how the Magnifica Humanitas reads to me. I agree whole heartedly that its not a call for Holy War. It is, however, defining AI as a weapon on par with a nuclear bomb.
In a way, the Butlerian Jihad is the inverse of the Iron Giant.
Note the operational part of the second quote "Humans had set those machines to usurp..." this clearly implies a deliberate priming of artificial intelligence in a specific direction, one not of integration with human life and values, but of usurpation. Herbert seems to offer neither an explicit condemnation of thinking machines nor a kind of backhanded endorsement of them. He simply places the Jihad into the historical timeline and forces his characters (and the reader) to reckon with it from different vantage points. The fact that the harshest criticisms of them come from highly unsympathetic characters raises obvious questions. Dune's protagonists are a grab bag of eugenicists, feudal tyrants, religious fundamentalists, cynical oligarchs, and fascists. Why should we take their various condemnations of artificial intelligence as a direct reflection of Herbert's own? We know what Herbert had to say about power and domination, about charismatic figures and cults of personality. This reading does its best to align with what we know of Herbert's actual beliefs, rather than simply the attitudes of his characters towards AI.
You are aware in that universe humanity goes on in perpetual hierarchical suffering, sorrow, war and misery, while the AGI run humankind of the Culture enjoy peace, health, parity, untold freedom and near godlike powers?
Forest, meet trees. The folks crafting our AI (and their neo-fascist tech bro cabal) are only, in fact interested in an Ayn Randian objectivist nightmare world wherein the mega-wealthy enslave the rest of humanity. We don't have to wait for "evil people" to steer these or have to believe in an good/evil binary, even, to understand their intentions and behavior sets are interchangeable with a classical definition of evilness in order to rightfully panic because the manifestation of AI as we know it is simply to enrich themselves while distracting the last remaining vestiges of democratic power just long enough to consolidate their own for world domination. Slaves don't care if their owners pray to any particular god.
I love this piece of writing for so many reasons that I'm having trouble articulating them. So here are a few random thoughts:
1. You really would make an excellent book or film critic. The way you unraveled all the threads in Dune has convinced me I need to read the series.
2. I find this point of view--that our true holy war is against the human instinct for domination, not against AI or any specific technology--to be weirdly reassuring. There has always been someone who has been trying to restructure society in order to dominate their fellow men, so this is an old struggle with an old enemy. We're fighting in familiar territory.
3. "We must struggle against the part of ourselves that wants to surrender our judgment, our care, our conflict, and our humanity to the machines." I would love to hear more about this. What are some things we can do as individuals to win the war of our own Greater Jihad? Some things that spring to mind are: educate ourselves on history and the human experience, consume art (like Dune, for example) that inspires critical thought and empathy, and surround ourselves with people who challenge our ideas so that we don't become complacent in our judgment.
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.
Good stuff!
Maybe it’s not within the scope of this essay but the authors’ beliefs on how much
AI should be embraced seems fuzzy here. Because there is nothing explicitly saying “No AI for any reason”, should I assume like other commenters that the argument is to decentralize AI control and creation and personally each of us decide how to use it in ways that doesn’t substitute for our own reasoning, creative pursuits, communicative abilities etc.?
Not exactly decentralize to that extent, but largely to bring the development of new technology under the reign of the collective in as broadly democratic a way as possible. This has happened somewhat organically in regard to data centers
I thoroughly enjoyed your analysis, thank you! I loved the Frank Hebert books. I do plan to read the Butlerian Jihad, even though Brian authored it. I know he pulled from Franks notes, so I just want to give it a chance despite having heard Brian is a real let down in comparison to his dad as an author of this storyline.
Is a real solution in our timeline a push towards decentralized ownership and decentralization in general? Similar to the outcome of the scattering?
Leto II forced humanity into thousands of years of tyrant oppression to force home a lesson. Does he not simply villainize prescience as a ruling authority, which became the central authority after the old Imperium fell?
Human, worm, machine, or other domination even in the pursuit of peace is a miserable experience for humanity. Centralization is the core of these dominating systems. We allow a centralized belief system to overcome our minds as individuals which is essentially giving up thinking to a centralized system, no matter what form. Genetics, religion, prescience, technology, historical precedence, military strength… we must hold space for multiple conflicting belief systems both intellectually as individuals and politically as humanity.
I personally believe that love is an attractive force in the universe that we as humans have evolved to feel emotionally because attraction is what creates life on both the subatomic and cosmological scales. Love and gravity are interlinked, although I am not exactly sure how. Perhaps gravity is a physical expression of the force of attraction and love is a metaphysical/emotional/ethereal expression of that same force of attraction that counters entropy.
In a lot of ways, my personal belief system distills into “love is life and fear is death”. Frank also hints at this in Heretics and Chapterhouse with Odrade and Marbella. Humanity without love is destined for extinction on a long enough time horizon. No matter how strategic, logical, or prescient our centralized authorities are when they steer humanity in exclusion of love.
The Butlerian Jihad always fascinates me in relation to our current timeline. We seem to be racing towards the timeline where the Butlerian Jihad exists. Our centralized authorities worldwide are almost pathologically committed to misdirecting the path of AI utilization on behalf of humanity.
I could chat forever about Dune… to end this long winded comment…
What do you think of the face-dancers trying to capture Duncan with the “net” at the end of Chapterhouse? That took things to another level for me that was difficult to wrap my mind around, but very intriguing nonetheless.
Brilliant piece as always. Especially important to consider in an age where the likes of Altman are suggesting he is aiming to make 'intelligence' a resource like water or energy and others implying they are the most pure arbiters of truth we have managed so far. They really want us to outsource our thoughts and decision-making capacity to their machines so we can unburden ourselves of agency ...
Love to see you illustrating this with Davison's images (and crediting him). He's such a weapon.
Genuinely a goat. My god.
I see your basic argument that AI is not inherently bad, and that Butlerian Jihad itself was not anti-AI but against the Oligarchy that controlled the AI. That AI itself is no deadlier than a loaded gun on the table, and that its the finger that pulls the trigger that's evil.
However, I do not agree with it. Nor do I think that Frank himself would agree. To use the two major quotes:
1) “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.”
2) “The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments.”
Both quotes target giving up thinking. The first one is explicit. The second, especially in the context of surrounding text, is about humanities willingness to give up their thinking as the definition of "machine-attitude". So the second reads more as: "the target of the Jihad was humanities willingness to sacrifice its thinking to the machines as the machines themselves."
To say that the parable of the Butlerian Jihad isn't that AI is evil just the masters of AI are evil is the exact same as saying Paul himself wasn't evil just the Bene Gesserit are. The entirety of Dune is verified to be about the dangers of a population when they give up thinking. With Paul, it is give up thinking to a charismatic leader. In the Butlerian Jihad is was to machines.
While you yourself did not explicitly make the loaded gun comparison, it was definitely implied. But the difference between a loaded gun and AI is everyone knows the dangers of a loaded gun. The dangers of AI, while heavily documented back to the onset of Google and the adverse effects of online search engines on memory attention (aka, giving up thinking to the machines) are not heavily known, constantly rebuked when brought up, and take an insidiously long time to take effect and thus easy to dismiss.
"But guns are a weapon and AI is a tool!" Is the typical response to that comparison. Many would argue that guns are tools. Still more would argue that AI is a weapon, which is exactly how the Magnifica Humanitas reads to me. I agree whole heartedly that its not a call for Holy War. It is, however, defining AI as a weapon on par with a nuclear bomb.
In a way, the Butlerian Jihad is the inverse of the Iron Giant.
Note the operational part of the second quote "Humans had set those machines to usurp..." this clearly implies a deliberate priming of artificial intelligence in a specific direction, one not of integration with human life and values, but of usurpation. Herbert seems to offer neither an explicit condemnation of thinking machines nor a kind of backhanded endorsement of them. He simply places the Jihad into the historical timeline and forces his characters (and the reader) to reckon with it from different vantage points. The fact that the harshest criticisms of them come from highly unsympathetic characters raises obvious questions. Dune's protagonists are a grab bag of eugenicists, feudal tyrants, religious fundamentalists, cynical oligarchs, and fascists. Why should we take their various condemnations of artificial intelligence as a direct reflection of Herbert's own? We know what Herbert had to say about power and domination, about charismatic figures and cults of personality. This reading does its best to align with what we know of Herbert's actual beliefs, rather than simply the attitudes of his characters towards AI.
Go get then- when adversity dis steals us to nothingness we reinvent. Carry on with a mental fist held high.
You are aware in that universe humanity goes on in perpetual hierarchical suffering, sorrow, war and misery, while the AGI run humankind of the Culture enjoy peace, health, parity, untold freedom and near godlike powers?
Forest, meet trees. The folks crafting our AI (and their neo-fascist tech bro cabal) are only, in fact interested in an Ayn Randian objectivist nightmare world wherein the mega-wealthy enslave the rest of humanity. We don't have to wait for "evil people" to steer these or have to believe in an good/evil binary, even, to understand their intentions and behavior sets are interchangeable with a classical definition of evilness in order to rightfully panic because the manifestation of AI as we know it is simply to enrich themselves while distracting the last remaining vestiges of democratic power just long enough to consolidate their own for world domination. Slaves don't care if their owners pray to any particular god.