Do We Need Our Own Butlerian Jihad? (Kind Of)

It Might Be Time to Shun Generative AI

(Jared Henderson wore this shirt to our latest livestream together and I had to use it for this post. Thanks Jared!)

Artificial intelligence is getting out of hand… do we need our own Butlerian Jihad today? Well, yeah, we do—or we will soon. But what does that all that mean?  

Butlerian Jihad = def.

Let’s start with The Butlerian Jihad. This is a fictional battle between humans and ‘thinking machines’ in Frank Herbert’s Dune Universe (Duniverse? What’s the official name for it?).

Herbert introduces The Butlerian Jihad early in his novel Dune, in order to explain why there are no robots in his world and to set up really fascinating concepts like ‘mentats’, who are human beings trained to think like advanced digital computers (like my Bayesian epistemologist and logicians friends).

The Butlerian Jihad is broached right after the Reverend Mother, Gaius Helen Mohiam, is done testing Paul Atreides with the box of pain and the gom jabbar. Their conversation turns to the topic of freedom and the Reverend Mother says “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.” To which Paul replies with a quote from the Orange Catholic Bible (a fictional amalgamation of several holy books in the Dune universe): “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.” The Reverend Mother then replies, “Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible…But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’”

So, Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad was a human revolt against artificial intelligence machines, specifically, those made to mimic the human mind—thinking machines. There’s a beautiful implicit warning present in Herbert’s background story: evil machines aren’t to be feared so much as evil humans utilizing machines to control other humans. But anyways, the war ended, the good humans won and they gave injunctions, in the form of religious commandments, against creating machines that mimic or counterfeit a human mind. In universe, it’s called ‘Butlerian’ after the guy who started the revolt, whose last name was Butler. But in our reality, Frank Herbert named it ‘Butlerian’ as an homage to Samuel Butler for his 1872 book Erewhon, a satirical story about utopia and the possibility of conscious machines.

So back to the question, do we need our own Butlerian Jihad against artificial intelligence today? Well, we need to know what we mean by ‘artificial intelligence’.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is a bit of a catch-all term today. ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI from now on) was coined by AI theorist, John McCarthy, during the Dartmouth Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. McCarthy sought to rename the concept of thinking machines, formerly termed ‘computer simulation’, in order to better represent the goals and shared meaning of the burgeoning AI research community.[1] But while the name is relatively new, the concept of AI goes back at least as far as René Descartes’s 1637 work, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences,