My favorite quote from dune:

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

What I find interesting about thinking machines in Dune, is that in a lot of sci-fi the artificial intelligence itself is what decides to destroy humanity. In Dune, humans in charge of the machines (technocrats) are the ones that come close to destroying humanity. The Jihad was a fight against them, as much as it was against the machines themselves.

So, in a way, we're more likely to see the Dune version of "machines taking over the world/universe" than say, Terminator's even though many joke about ChatGPT/Claude being Skynet.

At the end of the page is this paragraph:

Another, more subtle justification for the Butlerian Jihad is also found in Frank Herbert's original novels, specifically Heidegger's thesis that the use of technology trains humans to think like machines. The problem is that machines are deterministic; thus, training people to be machines is self-limiting.

I wonder whether Heidegger would consider the probabilistic nature of LLMs as having a positive effect on human thought.

Whenever I read the original novels, I always imagine the jihad to be a fairly benign if not peaceful exercise more akin to a protest than a war. Like if one day people started rolling across the world smashing data centers and laptops.

I was fairly surprised when his son wrote a novel that felt like a generic, bland robots run amok storyline that happened, more or less, because one guy/titan "ruined a good thing" by telling his AI to run in permissionless mode.

Herbert seemed to think that to be human is to be essentially 'open-ended', capable of undiscovered, indeterminate evolution, both personally and as a species.

Indeed.

In the book - is it men vs machines? Because it’s pretty clear in our world it will be men+machines vs men(probably also + some machines)

Maybe, we get Leo's Crusade instead.

But in the last book, Duncan arrives at the conclusion that humans and machines have to merge.

Nonetheless, I was always Team Venport

A fun idea I've been playing around with and testing on folks: We need a neo-temperance movement.

The first reaction is a scoff and a laugh of course - wasn't the original temperance movement an utter failure, prohibition didn't work etc. But no, the movement was far wider and successful in a multitude of ways. And a new temperance movement isn't about blindly copying something old, but situating yourself around the turn of the 20th century, understanding the multitude of interconnected problems people faced, the solutions they came up with and which ones worked and didn't.

America at the turn of the 20th century was a nasty place - there was wild corruption, politics was run by mafia-like patronage networks, wealth was extremely concentrated, rich people were unaccountable, working people suffered under low-paying, dangerous jobs, women were excluded from public life, and alcohol was merely the symptom of a very sick society, and yes indeed it was a massive problem, the way alcoholism is a massive problem in Russia today.

The original temperance movement was bound up tightly with the Suffarage movement (giving women a voice), with Taylorism (running organizations rationally), with income tax (a fairer less corruptible source of income for the federal government than tariffs and excise taxes).

Today's problems are thematically the same - massive concentration of wealth is making an unaccountable elite wielding power against the wishes of the public, creating dangerously addictive digital products, massive increase in gambling, restricting the rights of poeple to own and repair products, working to disenfranchise people, working to roll back women's participation in public life, etc etc. So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons, and we'll need the same type of movement to fight against them.

What the progressives of the early 20th century did was not abolish capitalism, but tame it. We don't need to go on a jihad against AI, but we do need to yoke it and disempower the current slate of people who own it and direct it.

Yeah, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, most science fiction depicted the world of the future as dominated by Japan… Look at Robocop 3 :)

That's just what the zeitgeist of the time was. Computers were then just appearing (or increasing) in the public discussion, along with fears that they'll make humans less human somehow.

Like in "The Computer Chronicles – Word Processing" [0] from 1983 at 4:08: "Some writers are concerned that computer assistance may promote dry bland writing."

Terminator appeared in 1984

That just shows humans have the same reactions whenever a new world-changing technology appears.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt0OoXluC8g

You got me wondering what the Imperium of Man's official stance is on AI:

The creation of a Silica Animus is also a terrible crime under Imperial Law by the decree of the Emperor of Mankind Himself as stated in the Treaty of Mars which united the ancient Mechanicum of Mars with the Imperium of Terra in 739.M30. Tradition holds that such unholy constructs are inherently evil and a perverted abomination in the sight of the Omnissiah.

Adeptus Mechanicus religious doctrine states that the Machine Spirit of a Silica Animus is a twisted mockery of the soul of a Human, always treacherous and insane.

Ancient texts tell apocryphal stories, shrouded in metaphor, of such murderous and powerful creations during the Age of Technology, and the legions of the "Men of Iron" that served them in the great war against Humanity remembered as the "Cybernetic Revolt."

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Silica_Animus

This will seem like prophecy and not fiction someday.

Iain M Banks sci fi also has stories where AIs must be wiped out.

A related discussion from June,

Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353670

One of the few sci-fi storylines that doesn't now feel hopelessly dated or anachronistic!

so this isn't really about Dune, but there was an article in the economist this week: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/10/14/...

It made me think about the book of the new sun. you think it's half man half monster creatures are unrealistic? give it a couple thousand years. good sci-fi really is prescient

Interesting to see this on HN! I've been beating the drum for quite a while that the Butlerian Jihad was never about terminator-style robot uprisings, but rather the intentionally-unexamined half of the themes the Dune ~trilogy ended up being about: long term fate of the species, the prospect of human speciation, the role of cold reason (read: aggressive utilitarianism) in leadership, and above all the concentration of power in light of modern technology.

All he mentioned explicitly was the very last clause, but the others are more important & uniquely-Dunean IMHO, and are central to the plot from the jump through the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, and the Guild Navigators, all ostensibly Homo sapiens sapiens despite being completely unnatural. Even "Imperial Conditioning" --which obviously plays the biggest part in the first act of the first book-- is arguably the same topic. By refusing to include computers and robots at all, the reader is naturally guided to consider those more familiar tropes in light of the world-building snippets we get. Which is kinda what makes Dune so genius, I think!

Like, to make it explicit... I think having the aforementioned abhumans drive the plot without significant support from inhuman minds raises more subtle questions than we're used to in far-future tales of robots, like:

1. Can one lose their humanity through experience, be it intentional "conditioning" or just the acquisition of power? (see: Paul vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)

2. Once one has lost their humanity superficially, can it be brought back/up/forward? Is love/greif the most plausible path, and thus the most human cognitive processes? (see: Dr. Yueh vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)

3. If we try to maintain our humanity in the long term --the default goal of non-insane futurists, though debated in the 21st c.[1][2]-- how do we protect against the natural urge to pursue power, which is (arguably) inherently human?[3]

I'll cut it off there cause this threat will likely be deleted anyway and I'm heavily procrastinating. Long story short: the Butlerian Jihad is not a condemnation of artificial minds, and if even it were, the condemnation would apply equally as much if not more so to the humanist empire in which the story is set.

Also, hopefully obvious, but just in case: it likely began as an excuse to write the stories that he wanted to write, just like the shield thing giving an excuse for swords in space. But I think Herbert deserves credit for what was running underneath that and elaborated on as it became a series of novels rather than cute periodical stories. He was pretty smart!

Also also: we do not discuss the son's book about Butler lol. It is verboten.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Became_Posthuman

[3]: This kind of structural conflict could be described as 'internal contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism or 'endogenous contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogeneity_(econometrics) depending on your preferred flavor of economics.

This gets mentioned on HN at least 5 times a day.

Bear in mind that the Dune universe relies on heavy plot armor to make it go. Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet, like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. "Spice" is important because it's needed to enhance the mental powers of pilots for interstellar travel. That's a job which probably could be done by a few avionics boxes in a rack. That's what requires the Butlerian Jihad.

(Or "spice" might be synthesized. In Herbert's day (the 1960s) organic chemistry wasn't up to synthesizing arbitrary small-molecule drugs, but now it is. It's a service you can order on line, even. Biologicals take more work, but that's what genetic engineering is for.)

The "mental powers" in Dune aren't that impressive. Compare, say, the Harry Potter universe. In Dune, mentats can convince people. Bene Gesserit can look up stuff in their genetic past. Some people can multitask. There are apps for that.

Herbert wanted knife fighters to matter in battle. Not going to happen. Militaries teach knife fighting to build aggression and for desperate situations, but nobody's battle plan depends on a knife fight. Needs too much surprise. Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat. Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets. Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War. Herbert wrote before a big, modern, desert war.

So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.