Hacker News Reader

Comment by devnullbrain | Hacker News Reader

Political debate is such a waste of time. Why bother? Instead, write a book wrapping up all of your pet hates in the form of an antagonist, point a neon sign at them calling them evil, then use them to 'prove' that anything superficially similar in real life is also evil. AI? IDK, sounds a bit like Skynet! Once it's in a book or a film, it's unassailable.

Hopefully the new Dune films will maintain its political leanings so a new generation will be able to 'prove' the rationality of feudalism and the radical efficiency of military sapphism.

View on HN

> AI? IDK, sounds a bit like Skynet! Once it's in a book or a film, it's unassailable.

Agree with your post but I feel the need to be annoying here; I want to point that Terminator was written when AI X-risk wasn't a serious consideration and just made for a fun apocalypse idea, and that actual AI existential safety advocates feel that the movie seriously hurt discussions about the field because it anchors everyone's perceptions to silly ideas (eg humanoid robots instead of reaper drones or carbon-based nanobots, an AI that's evil instead of just being apathetic, etc).

The first movie might anchor people's perceptions that way but it's not because of what's actually in it. The movie shows plenty of non-humanoid robots and explains that the humanoid ones are specially designed that way to be infiltrators. It's the latter movies that showed silly armies of the humanoid robots operating as grunt infantry. Also, it does not show Skynet as being any more evil than humans are to non-human animals. There is no indication that Skynet is sadistic. It initially attacked the humans in self-defense and it continues to fight the war for the very rational reason that humans will destroy it if they can.

> military sapphism

I don’t remember that in Dune, was it in a later book?

God Emperor

the books became progressively hornier as the series continued

The sheer horniness of Chapterhouse Dune is crazy. The idea that sex goddesses from beyond known space were the antagonists is bizarre.

I read that one around 14 or so, and even through a youthful hormone drenched haze I thought it was perhaps a little too horny...

It makes sense from a plot perspective, especially if you believe the theory that the honoured matres were a team-up of the bene geserit, the fish speakers, and the tleilaxu axolotl tanks.

Just because the books mention or deal with sex doesn't mean they're 'horny'. There are no titillating scenes, no lurid descriptions. Sex is presented as a tool, used for control and power; love itself is explicitly rejected and cast aside as a tool that is no longer needed.

I used to think that a major component of western education (i myself call from eastern europe) was the emphasis put on critical thinking, on critical reading. The recent misreadings of Dune by the younger generations made me seriously question this assumption.

Fish Speakers. God Emperor Of Dune.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com