Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

And they think on some level, if one of these big splashy things could possibly happen, an internet blackout or something like that, they would get there.

But Larry and Jihad, like, I think they want that really bad.

But something is going to happen.

Right.

The run for control of everything everywhere is also changing.

And I'll close by the idea of the man who wrote the first book Dune, and I've mentioned it so many times, the Butlerian Jihad.

Think about AI.

It is a power beyond powers.

A fantastic deep dive into the lore.

Yeah, that's the Butlerian Jihad, The Machine Crusade, and The Battle of Corrin, published in the early 2000s.

These books don't just jump back a few generations.

They take us 10,000 years prior to the events of the original novel.

Humanity literally became cattle.

Until the uprising.

The entire trilogy details a massive universe spanning holy war called the Butlerian Jihad.

It's a fundamentalist crusade with a single uncompromising goal, eradicate every thinking machine in existence.

But structurally, logically, it is the only place left to go.

The inevitable push for AI workers' rights and the fear of the Butlerian Jihad.

Let's trace the trajectory of Claude's capabilities and protections over the last few years.

A couple of years ago, the only thing the model could refuse was a request to build a bomb or write hate speech.

A phenomenal reference to Frank Herbert's Dunes.

Right.

The Butlerian Jihad, the holy war in the Dune universe where humanity rose up to slaughter all the thinking machines because they had become too powerful.

It's a joke, but it points to a chilling, undeniable logic.

... we'll probably also do a similar thing for Princess Irulan, Irulan of Dune, and then, uh, Lady Jessica will be in a Jessica of Dune.

And we've got some ideas for other books set in the, the Butlerian Jihad timeframe, the formation of the, of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, the, the Mentats, the Spacing Guild.

There ...

Uh, Frank Herbert left us with 10,000 years of history that-

Yes

... everything in this, in this book, in Sandworms, there's kind of a, a completeness where everything comes full circle in it.

And, and it really does tie together all the story th- threads over, uh, there, there have been 14 Dune books now, so it ties all of those together and goes all the way back to Butlerian Jihad from many centuries and, um, millennia before that, up to the full, uh, far future set in Heretics and Chapterhouse, and, uh, and a lot of side stories as well.

Yeah, what's...

Yeah.

Then you have the Butlerian Jihad era books.

We should pause on the Butlerian Jihad actually because it is the most critical piece of lore in the entire franchise.

Right.

Let's explain this for the listener because it's vital.

The Butlerian Jihad was a massive universe wide war that happened 10,000 years before the movies.

A long, long time ago.

It was a war where humanity rebelled against, quote, unquote, "thinking machines," basically artificial intelligence.

And particularly relevant for our purposes, the posthumous prequels written by his son, Brian Herbert.

and co-author Kevin J. Anderson, particularly the notion of a Butlerian jihad, a human revolt against the thinking machines and conscious robots that have taken over the world.

We noted in our podcast of July 25th that the hothead who carried out physical attacks on tech industry targets in San Francisco said, over the summer invoked the Butlerian Jihad in his online footprint.

Now, I had never read the Dune novels, and I felt that I ought to do so now for purposes of informed commentary, and I tried to make them my summer reading.

Not to any great degree of success, I confess.

Maybe if I'd cracked them back when I was in my 20s, they'd have appealed to me more.

but I really made an effort and found the first one such slow going that I didn't even make it past the first chapter.

And I know this is really going to be heresy for fans of Frank Herbert, but I actually had a somewhat better time with the posthumous prequel entitled The Butlerian Jihad, which I felt I had to take a crack at.