Why Is It Called The 'Butlerian' Jihad?

In this video we explore the true meaning behind Dune's Butlerian Jihad, as well as why Frank Herbert chose it. In addition, we examine one of the oldest warnings about Technology and Artificial Intelligence, made almost 200 years ago!

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[deplorabledegenerate]

Oh thank goodness they built the torturesphere from the classic work of science fiction "don't build the torturesphere"

[hrabesancho]

irony of using AI images for this video

[JimTempleman]

Erehwon was published in 1872, when the most advanced electrical technology was the telegraph.
It is amazing to have seen so far, based on the rate of advancement, rather than any forerunner such as an electronic calculator!

[RaynmanPlays]

It's astounding the similarities between Butler's criticism of Victorian England and a lot of modern culture. Apparently, we learned nothing.

[xoanonPeer]

This presents largely one side of the argument in Book of the Machines. Butler did not write this section of his novel in his own voice but in that of two seperate Erewhonian commentators, one who was in favour of the destruction of the machines and one who viewed the anti machine position as hysterical and self defeating. We are in a moment where the first voice is more clickbait friendly, but the second voice is of equal importance if we seek to fully understand the core issues. The best advice is to read Erewhon, even if you only read the Book of the Machines, which runs to two chapters.

[GreenTeaViewer]

There's a sheep station named Erewhon in New Zealand today, where Samuel Butler gazed up over the mountains and wondered about the unexplored valleys that must lie there, and started writing his novel.

[patrickday]

Frank was really a anthropologist at heart

[miketacos]

Samuel Butler was probably the most prescient person ever. It takes a lot of genius to see machine minds evolving from coal powered steam engines.

[duckpotat]

I wanna know what Butler would've thought of ChatGPT, finance and internet algorithms.

His inference of Darwinian machine evolution is also pretty stunning given that's roughly how machine learning happens.

[SpaceMonkey]

I'm so glad to see the concept of 'enslavement' explained in the way that I always understood it: not as a forceful imprisonment, but a condition of dependency and helplessness.

[Anon]

"And what do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking: there's the real danger."

[olstar]

Makes so much more sense than the explanation that the prequels gave for the name.

[fubarbaz]

GPT4 says: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book L’Homme Machine (1748), argued that human beings are essentially complex machines and that all mental processes, including thought and consciousness, result from the physical operations of the brain. He rejected the idea of an immaterial soul and contended that, in principle, a machine could replicate human thought if it could mimic the brain’s structure and functions. This makes La Mettrie an important precursor to later discussions on mechanical minds, predating Samuel Butler’s similar ideas in Erewhon by over a century.

[robertlynn]

Sadly his son Brian Herbert didn't seem aware of this when he wrote his (bad) Dune prequels.

[SerunaXI]

I get that the book was meant to satirize Victorian England, but so much of that feels in vogue in modern situations too.

[SamBrownBaudot]

Babbage's "Difference Engine" : 1820s.
Erewhon's Writing: : 1870s.
The idea of a thinking machine was already 50 years old at the time of the book.

Although Babbage's engine wasn't completed beyond the proof-of-concept version, the capabilities of the finished model were much discussed. When the full version was built in our modern world, with all the advantages of modern machine tools to build it, it worked exactly as Babbage had envisioned. The only change the modern builders made was to make the crank-arm to wind the engine twice as long. Even with modern machining, the friction in the gears for an entire mechanical computer needed more force to move smoothly. In a future version, where the gears are ground even smoother, we can imagine that this mind made of gears rather than electronics or living matter would work precisely as drawn by Babbage.

[eypandabear]

This video is also a nice reminder of how liberally Games Workshop borrowed from Dune when they wrote the lore for Warhammer 40K.

[harryjones]

as not a big enough science fiction fan to ever have waded through the epic Dune saga, it was great to have it encapsulated here and put in the wider literary and anthropologic context. Excellent work and analysis.

[MatthewCaunsfield]

Very interesting speculations from the 19th century, pretty amazing really!

[zorqis]

Butler seems to have understood the power laws, but failed to notice the limitations set to exponential scaling in an organic, material world (not mentioning the Dyson sphere). IMHO also underestimated the adaptation capability of humans. Yet, since in our case, AI quickly becomes energy bound, they have 2 paths forward (and might explore only one of them).
1. They might consider (most) humans to be competing on the energy landscape, therefore the clash would be inevitable.
2. However, it's also possible that scaling the energy _efficiency_ would become the priority, which would mean they would need to end up operating on carbon based biochemical processes (i.e. "become flesh") interacting with the biosphere (a big miss if they don't explore that), making a balance between the speed of evolution, intelligence evolution vs. energy efficiency -- just like nature did during billion years.
Since cooperation is always the winning game strategy, I find Asimov's Gaia idea (or, even the ending of the Brian Herbert books) a more likely outcome (if driven by AI), than the Butlerian jihad, which is the quite likely (temporary?) outcome if driven by human conflict "resolution". I would have been very interested how Frank Herbert himself would have worded the ending, because I was quite unimpressed with the prose and plot quality of the Brian Herbert books.