Maybe, but Frank Herbert's Dune books don't really explain it. The Butlerians simply exist to justify Mentats, and then get tossed aside. There are lots of similar plot points that have an "oh cool" moment but never see proper exploration.

Dune's central theme about balancing power and authority is much more prescient for our time, but I suppose we'll have to wait for Villeneuve's Part 3 before Silicon Valley discusses it.

I feel like the book explains it plenty, it's just extremely succinct.

> “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.”

What else needs to be said? We see examples of this throughout human history all the time. People thought at the early onset of the industrialization that people would become freer by leaving feudalism but all it did was immiserate workers for another 130 years (immiseration still ongoing in certain areas of the world).

It's basically rentierism taken to the extremes.