Dune’s War on AI

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind

(apologies for the thumbnail, the song's great though!)

One Year Later

I hadn't quite intended this when I chose today's topic, but it turns out I published my previous post about AI on January 16th, 2025 – maybe there's something in the air that has me dreaming of smashing circuits and burning data centers this time of year.

As you may have observed, the goblins – I mean tech moguls – have not in fact recognized and repented for the damage they are doing to the Earth's water supply and people's livelihoods, and in many cases have instead doubled down on their humanity replacement scheme.

I admitted last year that certain areas, like medicine and the sciences, would probably reap true benefits from the technology. Maybe that's even happened! But all I see are the AI videos and influencers, melting our brains at the best of times and spreading horrifying amounts of disinformation the rest of the calendar year.

I've also found myself lowering my guard and accepting the Google AI's summary far more than I would have thought possible this time last year. Sure it can be nice to have a quick answer, but how soon before the average person's ability to research drops below zero? How long will there still be information to be researched at all, rather than buckets of AI slop endlessly pouring into one another?

Back in 1965, Frank Herbert envisioned a world where humanity had overcome its reliance on and subjugation by machines, instead focusing on expanding the limits of human potential. When will we make that dream a reality?

(I endeavour to bring new and unique insights each week, so I'll readily admit that I'm certainly not the first or only person to write about this topic in recent years. Which is probably a good thing, in this case! It also means I'll try to keep this one a little shorter, after two weeks in a row counting among the longest I've ever written.)

Tor Books 2019 cover of The Machine Crusade (artist likely Jim Tierney but I'm having a difficult time confirming that)

The Butlerian Jihad

As I've written about before, the Dune saga is fundamentally about keeping humanity free, both from charismatic tyrants and placid stagnation. The Butlerian Jihad, an event which took place over ten thousand years before Frank Herbert's books, is intrinsically related to both of those fears – though perhaps it depends on what you consider canon.

I think the Jihad Frank Herbert originally envisaged was one we might easily imagine today, albeit more visibly Catholicism-coded. Not a war so much as a rapidly growing movement to destroy the technology that had enslaved humanity into the form of mindless drones, overwritten their hopes and dreams with drooling placidity.

The Jihad that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson portray in Legends of Dune (2002-2004) is all-out war against literal sentient machines bent on oppressing humanity, with mighty human heroes and terrifying posthuman Titans embroiled in a galaxy-spanning conflict. Look, eleven-year-old me loved it, and even now a hint of that fascination remains... but I think it's fair to say that those books lack much of Frank Herbert's nuance and thoughtfulness.

Whether you prefer the first, the second, or even some combination of the two, the result was humanity doing away with the vast majority of their technology, and adopting a fundamental law into their new Orange Catholic Bible (which includes a wide mix of Earth religions and philosophies): "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

Painting of the Butlerian Jihad from Dune (1984) TV Prologue

Modes of Thought

Post-Jihad, Herbert envisioned specialist humans taking on the roles previously filled by thinking machines. In the absence of even so much as calculators, 'mentats' would eventually rise as human supercomputers, enhanced by drugs and inevitably bringing their human loyalties and biases into their calculations. (There is also perhaps a conversation to be had about mentats and problematic depictions of savant autism – and furthermore Dune's relationship to ideas around eugenics – but I'll simply remark on that and move on today).

Similarly, the complexities of interstellar travel are eventually handled by mutated Guild Navigators, who rely on the future sight of the spice in order to choose their routes – the routine calculations of which are beyond even the abilities of mentats to calculate. Other schools, like the Bene Gesserit and Swordmasters, show societies specializing in specific areas that had previously been made obsolete by thinking machines.

Meanwhile the Bene Tleilax dive headfirst into hacking and reprogramming human bodies in ways that today's AI enthusiasts would probably be totally on board with. (There are no Tleilaxu women, only biological wombs in the form of axlotl tanks.) Maybe that 'Eugenics and Dune' post should actually come sooner than later, huh.

Something I'm just realizing (remembering?) now is that Frank Herbert actually shows hints of technology returning in his later books, and that his son's sequels aren't entirely to blame. The Houses of Ix and Richese are mentioned as early as the original Dune (1965) as leading machine industry, and the galaxy is wary of them toeing the line set by the Butlerian Jihad. But four thousand years later, we see Ix replacing Guild Navigators with computers once more – threatening the Guild's monopoly but also finding a solution to how fragile humanity's reliance on spice is.

Of course, this development is concurrent with Ix's development of the 'no-room', which also mimics a Guild Navigator's innate ability to shield themselves and those around them from the future sight (prescience) of others. Which, the more I think about it, seems to imply that they're either toying with extremely powerful supercomputers or are cheating somehow. But Leto II also managed to isolate prescience-invisibility in the Atreides genome over a few thousand years, so who the hell knows!

Thufir Hawat, portrayed by Stephen McKinley Henderson, art by DeathRayGraphics

Smash Your Laptop?

AI's negative impact on our critical thinking skills, media literacy and general intelligence is only just beginning to show itself. Its role in creating unemployment is already being felt across sectors. The internet we knew three years ago is long gone, now filled with both AI slop and AI channels reposting human content. Even if you take AI out of the mix, I find it hard to look at the way we're consuming media and feel hopeful about our species.

I'm in awe that Frank Herbert envisioned this philosophical issue over sixty years ago. And in some ways he's more right than he ever knew, with the way a few goblins – billionaires? no, goblins – tyrannically shoving their complacency machines down our throats until we and the Earth we inhabit suffocate.

With most of my posts, I end with a reminder that what I'm talking about is only fiction, that we can take lessons from it but can't emulate the actions it details. But in this case, I think our species genuinely has a choice ahead of it: succumb to the machine, or break free.

Thanks for reading and until next time <3