Why Fears About AI Are Misplaced — Conclusion

Sixty years ago, Frank Herbert offered what is perhaps the most enlightened and nuanced take on artificial intelligence and its potential impact on society. Contrary to what some think, the Bulterian Jihad was not a roadmap on how to deal with it!

Welcome back to my series on AI, and if you’ve made it this far, I thank you! Granted, it can be tough to do justice to a topic as polarizing and complex as this with just a few posts. But eventually, you need to wrap things up. Luckily, I saved the best for last. For the final installment, I have chosen to address what is perhaps the most inspired and insightful treatment of humanity’s future with AI. I am referring to Frank Herbert’s timeless classic…

Duuuuune!

In 1965, what would grow to become Frank Herbert best-selling (and best known) novel was published. Combining history, sociology, ecology, and biology with religious, philosophical, and cultural commentary, Dune would prove to be one of the most influential works of science fiction ever published. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “I know nothing comparable to it except Lord of the Rings.” Or, to paraphrase a common sentiment: “Frank Herbert did for science fiction what J.R.R. Tolkien did for fantasy: he made people take it seriously.”

As fans of Dune are intimately aware, the story of Dune contains a backstory wherein humanity revolted against “thinking machines” roughly 11,000 years before the main story takes place. This event was known as the Butlerian Jihad (aka. the Great Revolt), which is defined in the novel as:

the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

While this definition does not provide much in the way of background information, Frank managed to slip details and hints at what the Jihad entailed throughout the series. The most significant appeared in the series’ fourth installment — God Emperor of Dune — in which Leto II (the God Emperor) addresses it, saying:

“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. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

Based on these descriptions, I had always pictured the Butlerian Jihad as a sort of Luddite rebellion that happened on a galactic scale. Frank was very clear that the war was religiously motivated, as evidenced by the passage from the O.C. Bible, the fact that it was a “holy war,” and the way it led to the Great Convention, which included a proscription against the development of artificial intelligence and any technologies that allowed for any type of automation.

This event is one of the main reasons why humanity has regressed to a feudal state of governance in the series. In the third book, Children of Dune, the character of Duncan Idaho ruminates on how history has led humanity to its current state of affairs. This includes Medieval-style warfare (the result of Holtzman Shields), the ban on the use of atomics, and the dynastic nature of the Imperium, complete with Emperors, Dukes, Barons, Great Houses, and fiefdoms. Here’s the passage:

Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers — new planets.

Genius!

These passages illustrated Frank’s take on human history and the relationship between technical progress and social change. The Industrial Revolution, which introduced the concept of automation, had a profound impact on human societies, resulting in a lifestyle that reflected the machinery itself. In addition to machine production replacing “cottage industries,” the Industrial Revolution led to just about everything becoming “rationalized.”

This included “rationalized time,” where duties were now organized in terms of minutes and hours, not the natural rhythms of the day and the human body. This change reflected how labor itself had shifted from being task-oriented to time-oriented. To quote Orwell, the introduction iof machine production and automation also meant that the nature of wealth had changed, which threatened the old (feudal) social order:

“[W]ithout being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was something impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

“But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society.”

This style of deep insightful commentary is why I loved Dune so much and why people take it as seriously as they would Orwell and 1984. Frank clearly understood how the modern age came to drastically alter human history and humanity’s sense of itself. But what I found truly original was the way he predicted that AI would eventually be destroyed by humans who wanted to regress to a simpler existence, characterized by absolutist rule, religious devotion, and certainty — the very things that (according to some historians) were lost with the destruction of the Medieval, feudal order.

But what was especially interesting was the notion that humans turned on the AI, not the other way around. The result of this revolt and the permanent ban it placed on AI and automation was the creation of the Imperium, the rise of its absolutist power structure, and humanity’s total dependence on the spice melange. Throughout the series, this system is portrayed as corrupt, decadent, and stagnant, and something that the Kwisatz Haderach (Paul and Leto II) must guide humanity away from to prevent its extinction.

In the latter books, Frank even hints that part of this process of freedom and maturity involves finding a balance between the artificial and organic. This includes Leto II’s relying on technologies that defy the Great Convention, and how he deliberately encourages their development (like the Ixian “navigation machines.”) Based on Leto II’s teachings and example, the Bene Gesserit also begin embracing technologies that defy the Great Convention — including cybernetics.

Big Difference!

One of the reasons why Herbert’s work is so relevant to me and other fans (aside from it being genius) is the fact that Frank passed away in 1986, before he got a chance to complete the series. The final book in the series, Chapterhouse: Dune, was released a year before and contained several loose threads that he clearly meant to address in another installment. Starting in 1999, his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson began releasing prequels to the Dune series, followed by a sequel based (they claim) on notes Frank left behind.

A glaring difference between their work and Frank’s original series was their portrayal of the Butlerian Jihad. By their own admission, Frank had left scarcely any information beyond the passages I cited above, and they were forced to rely on their own imaginations to build this backstory. And boy, did it show! Whereas Frank’s references to this event hinted at a puritan-like revolt against machines and automation (imho), they portrayed it in a much less subtle fashion.

For them, humanity had been “enslaved” by machines in the most literal sense, and the resulting Jihad was a Terminator-style battle of free humans vs. evil machines. In addition, they ended the series by bringing back the evil machines and other characters they created, not Frank. This change was rather significant to me because it reflected two very different writing styles.

Frank was subtle and nuanced, building background, characters, and tension slowly over the course of hundreds of pages. Brian and KJA, on the other hand, take the pulp approach, relying on stock characters and accessible ideas and motifs that audiences can immediately identify. I therefore feel that their different takes on the Butlerian Jihad are similar. Frank was going for something complicated and deep, his son and KJA were going for quick and familiar.

What is more familiar than evil AIs enslaving humans someday?

The cliched trope of the AI turning on us has been around for so long, its treated like an accepted fact. But always, the reasons for this are poorly articulated and based on anthropocentric thinking. Granted, we’re paranoid about what AI would do because… we have no idea what an artificial sentience would do. So why do we assume that the rise of AI will spell doom for humanity? Because we expect to behave the way we would in its place.

Ultimately, fears and aspiration about the coming of AI boil down to irrational thinking and polarized opinions. It will have consequences and benefits, like all technologies since the beginning of time. Much like automation, computers, and the internet, there are fears it will eliminate jobs. Much like cameras, telephones, electricity, and television, there are worries it will cause human beings to slip into decadence and consume us.

While some concerns are justified, these are shared by everyone responsible for the development and legislation of technology. And they have led to efforts to address potential issues in advance. Other fears, meanwhile, are irrational and typical of change. The only solution is to get informed and learn precisely what is going on and leave the irrationalism behind.

Thank you for sticking with me through this series!