Comment by SideburnsOfDoom

Two subtleties in Frank Herbert's original formulation that are often missed:

The first has been covered: "Once men turned their thinking over to machine ... that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Men did the enslaving. It describes a techbro oligarch takeover, not an AI takeover. The machines do not have agency.

Hebert was really into the whole idea now expressed as "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." i.e. good times, people get lazy, then get weak, then get enslaved. (1)

And the second is that "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" is not the same thing as "Though shalt not make a machine mind". A drawing or statue of a person is "in the likeness" of that person. It's not a person. It doesn't have to actually be the thing in order to qualify as "likeness" of it.

People who scorn LLMs would agree that they produce something like the output of a human, in the sense that a parody, a caricature, a cartoon is a likeness. An uncanny valley mockery of the thing is "in the likeness" of a thing.

Ultimately, Herbert put this in his fiction because he didn't want to write about robots or machines, just humans and human potential (2). So he wrote it out with a few paragraphs of backstory in the novels' distant past. You can over-interpret it. Herbert wanted to sound deep, but he did not always succeed. And even when he succeeded in that, his views were not always the best.

1) https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_potential_movement