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Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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

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.

Also reminds me of the shield technology and laser weapons. Making them go boom when put together is a way to get rid of them and ensure certain kind of setting. Even if the whole thing is just weird if think about physics.

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