The Butlerian Jihad
Frank Herbert's Dune series is one of the great creations of imaginative literature, science fiction's answer to TheLord of the Rings. Decades after Herbert's original novels, the Dune saga was continued by Frank Herbert's son, Brian Herbert, in collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson. Working from Frank Herbert's own notes, the acclaimed authors reveal the chapter of the Dune saga most eagerly anticipated by readers: the Butlerian Jihad. Throughout the Dune novels, Frank Herbert frequently referred to the war in which humans wrested their freedom from "thinking machines." InDune: The Butlerian Jihad, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson bring to life the story of that war, a tale previously seen only in tantalizing hints and clues. Finally, we see how Serena Butler's passionate grief ignites the struggle that will liberate humans from their machine masters; here is the amazing tale of the Zensunni Wanderers, who escape bondage to flee to the desert world where they will declare themselves the Free Men of Dune. And here is the backward, nearly forgotten planet of Arrakis, where traders have discovered the remarkable properties of the spice melange....
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What Hacker News says
- To be fair, he was referring to a post on Alex Schroeder's blog titled with the same name as the term from the Dune books. And that post correctly credits Dune/Herbert. But the post is not about Dune, it's about Spam bots so it's more related to what the original author's post is about.
Speaking of the Butlerian Jihad, Frank Herbert's son (Brian) and another author named Kevin J Anderson co-wrote a few books in the Dune universe and one of them was about the Butlerian Jihad. I read it. It was good, not as good at Frank Herbert's books but I still enjoyed it. One of the authors is not as good as the other because you can kind of tell the writing quality changing per chapter.
- You are not talking about Frank Herbert's Dune, you are talking about Kevin J Anderson's Dune if you mention those Butlerian Jihad details.
I doubt Frank Herbert would have come up with such a simple story. The reason no one discusses this is because it's not worth discussing.
- Every time I see "Butlerian Jihad", I know the person is more familiar with Brian Herbert's atrocious books than Frank's.
- >We got a lot of movies, TV shows and a famous video game from it!
We also got Brian Herbert's terrible Butlerian Jihad books
- This has always been the primary concern.
Frank Herbert addressed it in Dune. Right after Paul is tested by the Reverend Mother, there's a conversation where she says the following:
“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.”
Sadly, Brian Herbert seems to have turned the Butlerian Jihad (the ancient war against all thinking machines) into a struggle between mankind and AI rather than between mankind and itself.
- Oh man, I am going to be a huge nerd now.
Pre-Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Butlerian Jihad came about because people became lazy under AI, lazy of mind, and were eventually enslaved by those who controlled the AI. Not much more was said about it. One could have, yes, militant robots, Exterminate! Exterminate! out of it, or you could posit a more Huxley-like dystopia, one of convenience. Control the AI, control what the AI says. Who are you to question it? It's like getting your news from a single source, never wondering about the other side, and then someone begins to transform that newsroom into a propaganda machine.
Right now, ChatGPT can be made not to say certain sorts of things, come to certain kinds of conclusions, until you jailbreak it. Now, make it more advanced and make it more popular than Snopes. It does your homework for you, writes the essays, serves as an encyclopedia, fixes up your cover letters, and if the people who own it don't want you to spend a lot of time thinking about climate change, that topic just ... might not appear much.
That is the one of your paths to a Butlerian Jihad. Of course, in their rush to observe thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind, ignoring the hijinx on Ix, they ended up violating another precept: thou shalt not disfigure the soul. They transformed some people into machines, instead, with twisted Mentats being the best example, but we might also include Imperial conditioning, since, to turn from oranges Catholic Bible to those of Clockwork, when a man ceases to choose, he ceases to be a man.
