| ▲ | Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI(technology.inquirer.net) |
| 11 points by SVI an hour ago | 9 comments |
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| ▲ | orbital-decay 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Of course the article mixes things up in order to push a cheap narrative. Herbert's Butlerian Jihad was a rehash of Islamic ban on images of people that is supposed to prevent idolatry and preserve uniqueness of God. It's purely religious in nature and has nothing to do with "tools of oppression". Not to mention that absolutely any automation, even the simplest kind, was considered a thinking machine and was banned, not just that arbitrary range of things called AI. |
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| ▲ | kombookcha 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a flattening of Herbert's angle - it is explicitly stated in the quoted section in the article that part of the reason for the ban is that the people who control thinking machines would exert outsized control on those who depend on them. This is a recurring theme in Dune, as we see with anxieties about dependency on mentats and Bene Gesserit truthsayers (the latter of which are in fact exerting hidden influence from their positions of trust). The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune. | |
| ▲ | angelmanuel 8 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The tools of oppression reading is backed directly by the books: "But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them" Is it also true that Fremen are canonically descendants of Zensunni practitioners, which is a mix of Zen and Sunni Islam Many other restrict machines, and the dogma is encoded on a religious text called the Orange Catholic Bible. And, this might be a big jump but, some of the specific anti-machine quotes are similar to Matthew 12:31-32 IMO |
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| ▲ | tomaytotomato 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| LLMs cannot think, they just guess with some magic with the help of things like softmax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_function), that makes it seem intelligent. We aren't enslaved or at any risk just yet with this form of "thinking machine", but we do need to culutrally and emotionally come to terms with them. Let's not have any other "jihad" just yet, there's plenty of other jihads going on right now. |
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| ▲ | thih9 a minute ago | parent [-] | | Note that the article doesn’t say that AI itself would do the enslavement; on the contrary: > With the rise of AI came the rise of a technocratic class that created and controlled these machines, leading to oppressive structures over knowledge and the economy. There was also the fear that humanity became overly reliant on thinking machines thereby losing agency and a sense of free will. |
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| ▲ | ArneCode 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think it is unlikely that people will act to completely abolish technology once they are used to it in their everyday lives. |
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| ▲ | grey-area 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Seems a bit premature given the current state of word generators. |
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