People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done. I bet some govermenst would like to do that for ordinary people. They can ban visible products (chatbots, public APIs, GPAI services), and laws are already targeting those.
but you cant ban the math!
the same transformer/attention ideas work great as compressors, function approximators, and surrogate models in physics, chemistry, CFD, etc., where they show up as "PDE‑Transformer", "Neural Operator", or "Hybrid Surrogate Model", and not as "chatbot". ;-)
So even if you outlaw certain AI uses, the core tech will just move into scientific and engineering workflows under different names, where most people won’t recognize it. Would be interesting whether it is possible to write a LLM-like program just using compression and function interpolation algoritms.
> People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done.
I don't think we're talking about bans. The word Jihad, in Islam means struggle and usually it's accompanied by a religious "war", but not necessarily violent (see below).
> jihad , In Islam, the central doctrine that calls on believers to combat the enemies of their religion. According to the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth, jihad is a duty that may be fulfilled in four ways: by the heart, the tongue, the hand, or the sword. The first way (known in Sufism as the “greater jihad”) involves struggling against evil desires. The ways of the tongue and hand call for verbal defense and right actions. The jihad of the sword involves waging war against enemies of Islam. [0]
Maybe people can't win against machines, but they sure can fight e.g. by refusing to interact with AI online, at their job, vandalizing mass surveilance cameras, etc. etc.
I believe the Butlerian Jihad caused a ban for "thinking machines" with a tenet of "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." This to me at least points at a ban for things that behave or feel like a human, not on the underlying math. An ornithopter probably has some fancy AI-esque flight stabilization, but it isn't expressed in a human way. The same goes for function approximators and surrogate models, no one would do the things we see people doing with AIs today, letting them talk them into heinous acts or fall in love with them.
That being said I can very much recommend the two Hyperion books for a good look at AI and co-dependence in sci-fi.
It'll have flight stabilization and controls and the like, but those things predate and / or do not need AI; AI algorithms are too expensive and slow for realtime flight control things. Some of those were traditionally done mechanically, even.
Wouldn't surprise me if the rise of AI leads to some sort of Khmer Rouge / Cambodia-lite type of situation, where anti-technology and anti-intellectualism will grow.
Right now the message is more or less: If you want to "AI-proof" yourself, pick up a trade or manual job.
If we create a society where all the peons will work in healthcare / trades / manual labor, while the trillionaires control all their other aspects of (digital) life, that could very well usher in reactionary leaders.
I'd expect violent anti-technology rebels to be easily defeated by AI-powered drones, though.
Much like the traditional Samurai of Japan got crushed [0] by a new model peasant army of the Meiji Emperor, which adapted European guns, artillery and drill and basically exterminated them.
He was also warning against the followers, myths, institutions, and power structures that turn a talented person into an untouchable savior. Sounds familiar?
Sounds like Warhammer 40K where the God-Emperor was like "I am not the Messiah!" and everyone's like "He IS the Messiah!" but then perhaps his intent was to be worshiped as a god all along. 4d chess etc.
Much as I liked the books, enjoyed the most recent movies, big fan of Herbert; lining up the Pandora books to reread next. Etc.... people tend to read too much into his world building. Mostly he was just looking for backstory to lightly justify the story he wanted to tell. Pretty much none of the world building holds up to more than a passing scrutiny, and the Butlerian Jihad is no exception. Better to just enjoy the tales for what they are.
Agreed. He didn't have any strong opinions on AI, the idea that AI is the big bad mostly comes from his son's sequels as far as I can tell. Herbert set up the story with computers mostly written out because it's humans who are interesting, and it was humans he wanted to write a story about.
Totally agree with all the above: the jihad + OCB's role (IMO) is great author's device for setting up the scattering and evolution of the Honored Matres (chaotic evil) - where the potent mix of religion and gene manipulation become the key instruments of control by fear and seduction.
Note that the article doesn’t say that AI itself would do the enslavement; on the contrary:
> With the rise of AI came the rise of a technocratic class that created and controlled these machines, leading to oppressive structures over knowledge and the economy.
It also quotes Dune, where it is said more directly:
> 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.
I really despise when the term technocrat is misused. It has a very specific meaning in politics and is nowhere near "broligarch", "plutocrat from the tech industry", or any of the thousand different, legitimate ways to describe what people sometimes mean when they mistakenly say "technocrat". How can a political opinion be taken seriously when this extremely basic level of literacy on the topic is missing?
Not to "well ackchyually" your "well ackchyually", but language evolves. I guess in a few years we'll consider it just another instance of semantic shift, perhaps with a splash of folk etymology[1].
When "guess with some magic" can solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to, it seems fair to ask whether it's approaching risky levels of intelligence.
I mean we've been using technology to solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to do for years. Is Deep Blue sentient because it can beat any human at chess?
Deep Blue's strength was leveraging massive compute to execute a task-specific, human-written algorithm. The problems which LLMs are tackling don't elude mathematicians because they require too much number-crunching, but because they demand creative problem solving. The latter seems more profound, even if it doesn't imply sentience.
Not to get too reductive - but LLMs are essentially performing massive number-crunching at a textual representation level. If you've ever played around with early NLP models, they can give you some astounding results for aspects like sentiment analysis that would seem like creative problem solving to someone in 1950. You could say the same for using a neural network to perform things like object recognition.
That's not removing the amazing ability of LLMs and the scale of this accomplishment, don't get me wrong - it's incredibly impressive that specialised models are now able to walk down pathways for creative problem solving - but I don't think that suggests a sentience or profoundness - rather it's just number-crunching at a astronomically larger scale.
Man it annoys me to no end that this basic fact is so under discussed.
It’s as if calling something AI is all that’s needed to justify it being the same thing as Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI.
The ultimate fact is that LLMs are a pretty powerful technology that has little to nothing to do with most fictional depictions of intelligent machines.
Of course the article mixes things up in order to push a cheap narrative. Herbert's Butlerian Jihad was a rehash of Islamic ban on images of people that is supposed to prevent idolatry and preserve uniqueness of God. It's purely religious in nature and has nothing to do with "tools of oppression". Not to mention that absolutely any automation, even the simplest kind, was considered a thinking machine and was banned, not just that arbitrary range of things called AI.
This is a flattening of Herbert's angle - it is explicitly stated in the quoted section in the article that part of the reason for the ban is that the people who control thinking machines would exert outsized control on those who depend on them. This is a recurring theme in Dune, as we see with anxieties about dependency on mentats and Bene Gesserit truthsayers (the latter of which are in fact exerting hidden influence from their positions of trust).
Suk doctors are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune.
(Edit: Suk Doctors get imperial conditioning, not mentats)
> The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh
Dr Yueh was not a mentat, but a suk doctor who was subject to conditioning. (Which was broken by the Piter de Vries, via the pain amplifiers applied to his wife, Wanna.)
Paul himself was being trained to be a mentat, and there were no hints of conditioning there, neither with Paul, Hawat, or de Vries (albeit he was described as a "twisted mentat", whatever that means).
de Vries was a "twisted mentat" because he was designed by the tleilaxu to be so. I think there were suggestions that Yueh was, too.
That doesn't necessarily mean they were grown in tanks, though, they could just have been "groomed for purpose" in the same way the Tleilaxu's matriarchal counterpart the Bene Gesserit did.
(The Tleilaxu are to me a very obvious stand-in for "patriarchy": there are a few men ruling over a genderless, fluid workforce, and women are literally just birth machines.)
The tools of oppression reading is backed directly by the books: "But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"
Is it also true that Fremen are canonically descendants of Zensunni practitioners, which is a mix of Zen and Sunni Islam
Many other restrict machines, and the dogma is encoded on a religious text called the Orange Catholic Bible. And, this might be a big jump but, some of the specific anti-machine quotes are similar to Matthew 12:31-32 IMO
Herbert wrote other books about the dangers of god-like AI, so it wasn't just an "I don't want this."
Dune is very much about systems of power and oppression, the obvious and less obvious forms they take, and the way they transcend and direct individuals. Even when the individuals are almost omnipotent - in theory.
The whole point of Dune is that these systems are human, but have an independent life of their own.
The narrative is about modes of human supremacy, and a jihad against AI isn't just some optional world building, it fits the narrative perfectly.
Being a human may be sufficient (with important exceptions) to play chess, but playing chess well is not sufficient to be a human.
Likewise with math, it turns out, it appears. Likewise with most other things we classify as needing intelligence, I bet. It turns out that intelligence is not the same as humanity or sentience etc..
Young Amish typically venture out into wider society for a while to try it out for a while before returning to their community and settling into adulthood. Presumably the Amish returning now will have encountered LLMs or their output in one form or another during their journey. They're supposed to satisfy their curiosity and try a bunch of stuff, so they can make an informed choice about letting it go.
Doesn't it seem implausible that in the world of Dune they reached their level of technology without AGI? Perhaps all their tech is pre Butlerian Jihad, but even that seems questionable.
Seems like if it was adopted as a policy, there would have to be many gray areas where people pretend that they aren't really using AI - the ship's computer is just a domain specific finetuned version, after all, etc.
Additionally, the transhumanist ambitions represented by the Bene Gesserit or Navigator seem on par with all AI dangers to me. Why would the dangers of an incomprehensible machine mind be worse than the dangers of a transhuman being that was bred and optimized for generations? Who solved the alignment problem for these superhumans?
The Chinese government cares a lot about civil unrest. Which is why they are being much more careful with AI. They remember how the CCP came into power.
More concerned about America. Its freedom of speech means that every douchebag billionaire tech bro is allowed to run of their mouth and rile up the proles.
People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done. I bet some govermenst would like to do that for ordinary people. They can ban visible products (chatbots, public APIs, GPAI services), and laws are already targeting those.
but you cant ban the math!
the same transformer/attention ideas work great as compressors, function approximators, and surrogate models in physics, chemistry, CFD, etc., where they show up as "PDE‑Transformer", "Neural Operator", or "Hybrid Surrogate Model", and not as "chatbot". ;-)
So even if you outlaw certain AI uses, the core tech will just move into scientific and engineering workflows under different names, where most people won’t recognize it. Would be interesting whether it is possible to write a LLM-like program just using compression and function interpolation algoritms.
just my 2 ct
> People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done.
I don't think we're talking about bans. The word Jihad, in Islam means struggle and usually it's accompanied by a religious "war", but not necessarily violent (see below).
> jihad , In Islam, the central doctrine that calls on believers to combat the enemies of their religion. According to the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth, jihad is a duty that may be fulfilled in four ways: by the heart, the tongue, the hand, or the sword. The first way (known in Sufism as the “greater jihad”) involves struggling against evil desires. The ways of the tongue and hand call for verbal defense and right actions. The jihad of the sword involves waging war against enemies of Islam. [0]
Maybe people can't win against machines, but they sure can fight e.g. by refusing to interact with AI online, at their job, vandalizing mass surveilance cameras, etc. etc.
[0] - https://www.britannica.com/summary/jihad
I believe the Butlerian Jihad caused a ban for "thinking machines" with a tenet of "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." This to me at least points at a ban for things that behave or feel like a human, not on the underlying math. An ornithopter probably has some fancy AI-esque flight stabilization, but it isn't expressed in a human way. The same goes for function approximators and surrogate models, no one would do the things we see people doing with AIs today, letting them talk them into heinous acts or fall in love with them.
That being said I can very much recommend the two Hyperion books for a good look at AI and co-dependence in sci-fi.
It'll have flight stabilization and controls and the like, but those things predate and / or do not need AI; AI algorithms are too expensive and slow for realtime flight control things. Some of those were traditionally done mechanically, even.
> Would be interesting whether it is possible to write a LLM-like program just using compression and function interpolation algoritms.
gzip can be used as a (not very good) LLM-like text and image generator: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
Wouldn't surprise me if the rise of AI leads to some sort of Khmer Rouge / Cambodia-lite type of situation, where anti-technology and anti-intellectualism will grow.
Right now the message is more or less: If you want to "AI-proof" yourself, pick up a trade or manual job.
If we create a society where all the peons will work in healthcare / trades / manual labor, while the trillionaires control all their other aspects of (digital) life, that could very well usher in reactionary leaders.
I'd expect violent anti-technology rebels to be easily defeated by AI-powered drones, though.
Much like the traditional Samurai of Japan got crushed [0] by a new model peasant army of the Meiji Emperor, which adapted European guns, artillery and drill and basically exterminated them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satsuma_Rebellion
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The article had a great opportunity to at least reference the newest encyclical from the Pope.
With a bit of click bait, this might be the first step of "Butlerian Jihad" -> "AI Crusade" and a founding text for the Orange CATHOLIC Bible.
I saw a take that you can now cite religious reasons to refuse working on and with AI - if more people try this, I wonder how it'd play out.
Interesting times.
He was also warning against the followers, myths, institutions, and power structures that turn a talented person into an untouchable savior. Sounds familiar?
Sounds like Warhammer 40K where the God-Emperor was like "I am not the Messiah!" and everyone's like "He IS the Messiah!" but then perhaps his intent was to be worshiped as a god all along. 4d chess etc.
Much as I liked the books, enjoyed the most recent movies, big fan of Herbert; lining up the Pandora books to reread next. Etc.... people tend to read too much into his world building. Mostly he was just looking for backstory to lightly justify the story he wanted to tell. Pretty much none of the world building holds up to more than a passing scrutiny, and the Butlerian Jihad is no exception. Better to just enjoy the tales for what they are.
Agreed. He didn't have any strong opinions on AI, the idea that AI is the big bad mostly comes from his son's sequels as far as I can tell. Herbert set up the story with computers mostly written out because it's humans who are interesting, and it was humans he wanted to write a story about.
Totally agree with all the above: the jihad + OCB's role (IMO) is great author's device for setting up the scattering and evolution of the Honored Matres (chaotic evil) - where the potent mix of religion and gene manipulation become the key instruments of control by fear and seduction.
LLMs cannot think, they just guess with some magic with the help of things like softmax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_function), that makes it seem intelligent.
We aren't enslaved or at any risk just yet with this form of "thinking machine", but we do need to culutrally and emotionally come to terms with them.
Let's not have any other "jihad" just yet, there's plenty of other jihads going on right now.
Note that the article doesn’t say that AI itself would do the enslavement; on the contrary:
> With the rise of AI came the rise of a technocratic class that created and controlled these machines, leading to oppressive structures over knowledge and the economy.
It also quotes Dune, where it is said more directly:
> 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.
I really despise when the term technocrat is misused. It has a very specific meaning in politics and is nowhere near "broligarch", "plutocrat from the tech industry", or any of the thousand different, legitimate ways to describe what people sometimes mean when they mistakenly say "technocrat". How can a political opinion be taken seriously when this extremely basic level of literacy on the topic is missing?
Not to "well ackchyually" your "well ackchyually", but language evolves. I guess in a few years we'll consider it just another instance of semantic shift, perhaps with a splash of folk etymology[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology
When "guess with some magic" can solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to, it seems fair to ask whether it's approaching risky levels of intelligence.
I mean we've been using technology to solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to do for years. Is Deep Blue sentient because it can beat any human at chess?
Deep Blue's strength was leveraging massive compute to execute a task-specific, human-written algorithm. The problems which LLMs are tackling don't elude mathematicians because they require too much number-crunching, but because they demand creative problem solving. The latter seems more profound, even if it doesn't imply sentience.
Not to get too reductive - but LLMs are essentially performing massive number-crunching at a textual representation level. If you've ever played around with early NLP models, they can give you some astounding results for aspects like sentiment analysis that would seem like creative problem solving to someone in 1950. You could say the same for using a neural network to perform things like object recognition.
That's not removing the amazing ability of LLMs and the scale of this accomplishment, don't get me wrong - it's incredibly impressive that specialised models are now able to walk down pathways for creative problem solving - but I don't think that suggests a sentience or profoundness - rather it's just number-crunching at a astronomically larger scale.
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Man it annoys me to no end that this basic fact is so under discussed.
It’s as if calling something AI is all that’s needed to justify it being the same thing as Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI.
The ultimate fact is that LLMs are a pretty powerful technology that has little to nothing to do with most fictional depictions of intelligent machines.
Sloppy thinking all the way down.
Of course the article mixes things up in order to push a cheap narrative. Herbert's Butlerian Jihad was a rehash of Islamic ban on images of people that is supposed to prevent idolatry and preserve uniqueness of God. It's purely religious in nature and has nothing to do with "tools of oppression". Not to mention that absolutely any automation, even the simplest kind, was considered a thinking machine and was banned, not just that arbitrary range of things called AI.
This is a flattening of Herbert's angle - it is explicitly stated in the quoted section in the article that part of the reason for the ban is that the people who control thinking machines would exert outsized control on those who depend on them. This is a recurring theme in Dune, as we see with anxieties about dependency on mentats and Bene Gesserit truthsayers (the latter of which are in fact exerting hidden influence from their positions of trust).
Suk doctors are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune.
(Edit: Suk Doctors get imperial conditioning, not mentats)
> The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh
Dr Yueh was not a mentat, but a suk doctor who was subject to conditioning. (Which was broken by the Piter de Vries, via the pain amplifiers applied to his wife, Wanna.)
Paul himself was being trained to be a mentat, and there were no hints of conditioning there, neither with Paul, Hawat, or de Vries (albeit he was described as a "twisted mentat", whatever that means).
de Vries was a "twisted mentat" because he was designed by the tleilaxu to be so. I think there were suggestions that Yueh was, too.
That doesn't necessarily mean they were grown in tanks, though, they could just have been "groomed for purpose" in the same way the Tleilaxu's matriarchal counterpart the Bene Gesserit did.
(The Tleilaxu are to me a very obvious stand-in for "patriarchy": there are a few men ruling over a genderless, fluid workforce, and women are literally just birth machines.)
Hey, you're right, I don't think mentats get the conditioning as part of their training. I must have misremembered Thufir having the diamond tattoo.
The tools of oppression reading is backed directly by the books: "But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"
Is it also true that Fremen are canonically descendants of Zensunni practitioners, which is a mix of Zen and Sunni Islam
Many other restrict machines, and the dogma is encoded on a religious text called the Orange Catholic Bible. And, this might be a big jump but, some of the specific anti-machine quotes are similar to Matthew 12:31-32 IMO
Not a very deep justification. Probably the easiest thing to grasp for when thinking "how can I make this religious theme fit the narrative?".
It seems exactly the opposite to me: Herbert didn't want robots etc in Dune, so he came up with a religious figleaf to justify this.
Herbert wrote other books about the dangers of god-like AI, so it wasn't just an "I don't want this."
Dune is very much about systems of power and oppression, the obvious and less obvious forms they take, and the way they transcend and direct individuals. Even when the individuals are almost omnipotent - in theory.
The whole point of Dune is that these systems are human, but have an independent life of their own.
The narrative is about modes of human supremacy, and a jihad against AI isn't just some optional world building, it fits the narrative perfectly.
Seems a bit premature given the current state of word generators.
I guess top mathematicians are also mere word generators?
https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...
Being a human may be sufficient (with important exceptions) to play chess, but playing chess well is not sufficient to be a human.
Likewise with math, it turns out, it appears. Likewise with most other things we classify as needing intelligence, I bet. It turns out that intelligence is not the same as humanity or sentience etc..
They’re useful tools, they’re not general AI, nor are they anywhere near the scenario in Dune.
I think it is unlikely that people will act to completely abolish technology once they are used to it in their everyday lives.
This is called technological momentum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_momentum
The Amish (can't) enter the chat
Ok, you made me laugh :)
I think that most Amish were never used to technology though?
Young Amish typically venture out into wider society for a while to try it out for a while before returning to their community and settling into adulthood. Presumably the Amish returning now will have encountered LLMs or their output in one form or another during their journey. They're supposed to satisfy their curiosity and try a bunch of stuff, so they can make an informed choice about letting it go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa
Ok, that's cool
Doesn't it seem implausible that in the world of Dune they reached their level of technology without AGI? Perhaps all their tech is pre Butlerian Jihad, but even that seems questionable.
Seems like if it was adopted as a policy, there would have to be many gray areas where people pretend that they aren't really using AI - the ship's computer is just a domain specific finetuned version, after all, etc.
Additionally, the transhumanist ambitions represented by the Bene Gesserit or Navigator seem on par with all AI dangers to me. Why would the dangers of an incomprehensible machine mind be worse than the dangers of a transhuman being that was bred and optimized for generations? Who solved the alignment problem for these superhumans?
Why are you assuming that some technology can only be discovered by AGI?
"Who solved the alignment problem for these superhumans?"
The gun, pointed to their head.
The Chinese government cares a lot about civil unrest. Which is why they are being much more careful with AI. They remember how the CCP came into power.
More concerned about America. Its freedom of speech means that every douchebag billionaire tech bro is allowed to run of their mouth and rile up the proles.