Butlerian Jihad: Fiction or Our Future?

A concept in science fiction that, while not as ubiquitous as robots or space travel, can be found all throughout the genre is the idea of machines going rogue. From Terminator to Overwatch, robots rising up against their human creators catches the attention of many sci-fi authors. My personal favorite of these depictions, and the namesake of this post, Dune proposed a scenario that I’d argue was far ahead of its time. Thousands of years in the future, human society is subservient to “thinking machines” and the people who create them. Mankind eventually revolts from this machine-centric society in a holy war. Following the conclusion of the jihad, thinking machines are banned and humanity enters into a new, much more religious era. The Orange Catholic Bible is composed, enshrining humanity’s ability to think as its greatest feature. The Bene Gesserit, Spacing Guild, and the Order of Mentats are all created in order to fill the gaps created by a world without computers. As a result, the world of Dune looks and feels alien. While certainly not the series’ main theme, it highlights just how different humanity in the post-computer age are to those who preceded it. Will we, entering into a world of artificial intelligence, look so alien to those before us in 20-30 years? I am fascinated by the worldbuilding and philosophy of Frank Herbert’s novels and the fact that a man in the 1960s was able to write about things that are just as relevant now as they were back then is mind-blowing to me.

All this is to say that so many authors have written extensively about a future where humanity and machines have a troubled relationship and it makes me wonder if reality will follow a similar path. In the far future, I could forsee humanity abandoning artificial intelligence and our increasingly automated world out of concerns of it blurring the lines between man and machine. Maybe automating warfare will result in us having to liberate ourselves from AI supercomputers after they deem us to be a threat to ourselves and our planet. Or maybe after centuries of increasing social isolation and erosion of what makes us human we decide to take back our humanity for ourselves. As for the 21st century, however, I think AI will find its niche and help propel us further both technologically and societally. It, like all new technologies, seems strange and unfit for our current world, but in due time we will find tremendous use out of increasingly intelligent machines.