Comment by Thrombocius

> or a “what would happen if the Luddites won” scenario.

Worth also noting that the Luddite movement wasn't a wholesale, fervent rejection of technology: they neither rejected technology nor were inept at using it. The uprising was of skilled textile laborers who protested certain types of technology on the basis of how those technologies were applied and who they truly benefitted (i.e., the ruling rather than the laboring class). They were more concerned with how the tools would depress wages, displace skilled workers, and reduce the quality of the product produced than with technology as some boogeyman that should be systematically dismantled, and their protests were violently responded to with harsh legislation and military intervention.

Lumping them together with a Space ISIS is probably a bit of an unfair comparison

> The Dune Encyclopedia, which was not written by him but which he said he considered canonical

No, he literally wrote in the intro to the book that it wasn't canon. It was a fan project and he thought that it was great there were fans doing things like that.

edit: and like with the terrible Dune prequels, the impulse to say "here's what really happened" usually diminishes what's interesting and powerful about oblique allusions in SF meant at least partly to function as a mirror on humanity.

> The Bene Gesserit woman knew it was healthy because of her abilities, and upon investigation it was found that the hospital’s AI had been running a eugenics program.

The irony. Perhaps the Bene Gesserit were just trying to "pace the frontier" of the eugenics market? Who can say?

There's a lot that I think you missed in your reading:

If you read the preambles to each chapter and the glossary in the back of Dune, you'll find that the Butlerian Jihad was a violent war that lasted 100 years.

If you read the preambles to the chapters in Dune, you'll find the Butlerian Jihad's problems were explained rather succinctly: people turned over their thinking to machines and were ruled by the master of the machines, and thinking machines created poverty for workers.

The entire society, the great houses, the spacing guild, the Orange Catholics, Bene Geserit, and Mentats, all who emerged to replace functions of thinking machine and all three organizations had very real motivations to ensure that thinking machines would never rose to prominence again (and the Bene Geserit were quite surgically violet when needed) and it was clear that doing for an individual was a capital crime, and for a ruling house, would invite at the least the Spacing Guild cutting your world off, and transporting armies to destroy you at a deep, deep discount. The entirety of society was aligned against thinking machines, and this is what made Dune so different, and for me, fascinating as I grew up.

In Dune: Awakening, the first DLC has a storyline that takes you into the heart of a surviving AI's lair. It's strongly implied that humans drove it insane, rather than it starting out murderous.

I've always believed the Jihad was mostly about world building - defining a different vision for a how a future civilization could look than most sci-fi of that era was considering, and then exploring consequences of it throughout the epic. Somewhat akin to Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, but maybe even more similar to Tolkien.

I think it was also motivated by a desire to solve a number of problems with sci-fi that explores the far future and realistically considers the evolving role of machine intelligence. Frankly, a lot of those futures are not interesting for human story-telling because the humans are no longer making the important decisions and aren't the agents of change. Different authors have dealt with this problem in different ways.

Banks acknowledged that the Minds would be making most of the most important decisions, but carved out niches where humans (rather inexplicably) still held some advantages - e.g. in Special Circumstances. Much of it feels honest - humans in the Culture are mostly hedons who have everything provided for them by machines, everything is wonderful, and some people really struggle to find meaning. Ultimately though I don't find it credible at all. He doesn't see (so the Minds don't see) the ethical problems with his imperialist hegemony. He doesn't know about the alignment problem so there is no explanation of how it is dealt with, etc.

Vinge quite famously pointed out that you can't write sci-fi about super-intelligence because you have no idea what a super-intelligence would do; this is where many essential ideas of the singularity came from or were popularized. He dealt with it in one series by creating the zones of thought - godlike superintelligence and many technologies can only exist in the High Beyond or Transcend - far from the galactic plane. The further you get from the galactic center the faster computation can happen (including human thought). So you include elements of that in the story, but the story is set in zones where humans have to do pretty much all the decision making while dealing with threats posed by superintelligence. In Marooned in Realtime he dealt with it by disappearing the civilization without explanation (from the perspective of the characters).

Egan dealt with it - in Diaspora - by creating machine intelligence that is grown exactly the same way as human intelligence is - basically the next stage of human evolution. Those people retain most human characteristics (of personality, character, love, friendship) but still have incredible powers of reasoning and scientific exploration. He tells Vinge to hold his beer and follows those threads where he thought they might lead.

”In the original 6 Frank Herbert novels, it’s not ever truly explained what problems, if any, the thinking machines were actually causing.”

Apologies if I have misunderstood you but I believe it was explained. See the following:

“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.”

The quote I posted above is from Dune.

What about the cyborgs ? Whatever their name was.... I can't remember. But they were the "thinking machine" class?

> In the original 6 Frank Herbert novels

Aren't there just three of them?

>As humankind spread throughout the known universe, technology advanced and eventually machines were made that would make decisions for people. This propelled the creators of these machines into a new technocratic class, effectively controlling the worlds of the common people.

It's right there in the opening paragraph of OPs post. It's the people who controlled the machines that could not be trusted. We're not worried so much about about AI going rogue. We're worried because people who control it have aleady gone rogue. It is too powerful and dangerous a tool to be trusted in the hands of primates.