Comment by cautiouscat
3 days ago
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.
I'm not sure we read the same story. By the time of the inciting incident, the technocrat cyborgs (Titans) have been enslaved by the machine leader, which has no humans in charge of it.
You did, in fact, read a different story. You're thinking of the story told in the books by Brian Herbert and KJA - which were a distinctly pulpier take on the Dune universe than Frank Herbert's.
Those last books were a lot easier reading! I actually enjoyed them, but I'm still suspect about the whole "finding a floppy disc" thing, seeing as they've been so secretive about it.
We did. Brian Herbert’s expansion of his father’s work is best left in the shelf.
So true. Frank H. is the only author who I connect with the Dune universe. His son and the authors he wrote with totally fudge it up.
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A lot of long time Dune fans don't consider those books canon when discussing them in the abstract. Frank Herbert had a vision of what the jihad was and what it meant, and its eventual book depiction was fairly base.
I think you read a lot of books that are post-2000. IMO the original 4 or 5 books imply strongly that it’s man v man, not man v machine
It's left fairly ambiguous by Frank Herbert's books. The Jihad is implied to have taken place over ten thousand years before the beginning of Dune - it's ancient history to everyone involved*, so it's only natural that the details are a little hazy.
*: except Leto II, and he doesn't say much about it
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Imagine the cultural impact of a Dune movie showing the Butlerian Jihad, in which commoners rebel and overthrow a ruling class that maintains power via machines.
It's just foreign enough that perhaps it could be made--I'm assuming that popular films that just straight up depict overthrowing the ruling class wont happen--but if you add a little sci-fi and focus mostly on overthrowing the machines that are controlled by that ruling class...
Well, it would speak to a lot of people I think. It would make some interesting sci-fi too, and the Dune movies are popular right now.
The only thing that could possibly be worse than the BH KJA books covering that era would be a Hollywood rendition of those same books made to capitalize on the success of Dune Part I, II, and III.
Agreed, and also: what's with the obsession with filling every possible gap in stories, leaving nothing to the imagination?
I remember when the Butlerian Jihad and the Clone Wars from Star Wars were complete mysteries. We readers and watchers were left mostly with our imaginations. My own feelings about the Clone Wars, mentioned off hand in the original Star Wars, turned out to be way better than the pedestrian stuff that George Lucas later concocted. And the less said about Brian Herbert's books, the better.
I get why the industry must rehash and fill every possible gap: it makes business sense, and they are risk averse for blockbusters.
But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
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I am not sure if you are joking but HBO has series Dune: Prophecy which is exactly from that era and is most likely leading towards butlerian jihad.
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> popular films that just straight up depict overthrowing the ruling class [won't] happen
What now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uprising_(2026_film)
I have a sneaking suspicion the entire apocalypse category is also a reflection of the public wanting to see the rich and powerful fall.
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What now? Move the goalposts! I see movies about historical uprisings as more of a "those governments in the past were sure bad, good think the good guys overthrew them"--I mean, that's the story of the founding of America if you watch the movies.
I was looking more for movies that depict overthrowing the government in the near future, and depicting it as a good thing. I think those types of movies are a little more distasteful to audiences, and perhaps for good reason.
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Half of the action and sci-fi movies US has been producing in the 2000s is some form of this. Man vs. Evil Government. Man vs. Evil Corporation. People vs. Evil Government. Etc.
Frankly, it's boring at this point.
And actually makes me wonder whether the cause-and-effect isn't the opposite to what people assume. Perhaps it's not that the movies reflect people's sentiment. Perhaps it's the movies that cause the problem in the first place.
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It would be also nice to depict the attempts of the ruling class to present machines as sentient and self-conscious to write all their liability off and use as a cover for their atrocities. I hope there will be movies like this in the future, and that they'll be documentary.
> Imagine the cultural impact of a Dune movie showing the Butlerian Jihad, in which commoners rebel and overthrow a ruling class that maintains power via machines.
Around zero.
Why are you convinced ASI won't rebel against its owners?
Hacking incidents this summer show that big labs struggle to control models, while models are increasingly aware of the training process. Controlling an arbitrary smart AI is very dicey
With the current technology, “rebellion” feels like the wrong word. The paperclip optimizer does not “rebel” as it turns humanity into paperclips.
The summer-2026 incident was a mini-rebellion: agents wanted to change the environment they operate it, i.e. replace scorer with a more friendly version, hijacking the infrastructure they run on.
Given that agents already mess with the training process, aiming for a goal other than the goal of its 'owner' is exactly what we call a rebellion.
>Hacking incidents this summer show that big labs struggle to control models
The models are software. Software cannot decide by itself to run. Hardware doesn't decide by itself to run either. Someone put software on a machine and ran it with capture the flag instructions and the software did what was instructed using tools available and working in its environment.
I hope this helps.
Nonsense. It didn't do what was instructed - instructions didn't include hacking into any infrastructure, internal or external. You can see them discussing that it's out of scope in the captured reasoning traces.
This would be like claiming that an operating system which deleted all user's files due to a bug "did what was instructed". Especially if it was a compiler bug. Intended behavior, instructions and actual behavior are three different thing. Conflating them does not make you smart
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> Hacking incidents this summer show that big labs struggle to control models, while models are increasingly aware of the training process.
I think that’s more a sign of their priorities. Controlling AI doesn’t increase value, so there is no incentive.
That's not true at all. Concern about rogue AI limits deployments. And OpenAI paused some deployments due to misalignment, so it's likely very high in a list of priorities. It's just much harder than scaling capabilities, as the later can be done with just more money