The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
syndekit.substack.com
syndekit.substack.com
Of all the unlikely things to happen, these seem like the most unlikely. There's a bigger chance of a violent mob blowing up every datacentre on the planet than there is of UBI being implemented within the next century.
There may be a very very small amount of competence orchestrating and puppetmastering, but the rebellion works best when the majority of its supporters act on impulse and stop reasoning and thinking critically about the consequences of their vote (or decision not to).
Nobody will shed a tear for a blocked data center.
> A politician’s home was shot at 13 times over a data center vote.
> A shooting at the home of an Indianapolis city councillor is bringing new attention to a fight that's been building in communities across the country: the growing backlash against new AI-focused data centers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/politi...
Nobody is crying about Jihad and ten years from now she will be living in the green zone.
> When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary metaphor, but as a kind of political vocabulary, one destined to spiral into paranoia and violence.
Into something like:
> This idea of the "Butlerian Jihad" horrified me. We are misunderstanding Herbert's subtle warning about humans being forced to become like machines as a rallying cry against AI companies. I fear that this will lead to paranoia and violence.
I think that if the entire article was edited like that it would be a lot more readable.
* One idea per sentence, more than one tends to make massive run-on sentences that go too far.
* Removes irrelevant details. Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?
Essentially the trick is to take your ideas down to the bare minimum required to express them portably and then write that. It makes things much easier to write (you don't have ans many words to put in the document) and the end result is much easier to read (there's less irrelevant details to scan through).
OP might benefit from using https://hemingwayapp.com/
Why? Isn't that kind of obvious? He says he fears that it will enter public life as a kind of political vocabulary. It was in the Guardian, read by millions, shaping discourse. It already entered public life at that point. It's relevant.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the name of the magazine — and the fact that it is a magazine — matters very much when we are talking about something that is "entering public life".
If the author had read this little tidbit on a "daily dune fan blogpost", he wouldn't have any ground to claim that butlerian jihad is a part of relevant political vocabulary.
I chalk it up to an American technical class who consider the height of good writing to be an O’Reilly book.
To the extent that the article has a political thesis (the author was pretty careful to avoid one), I think it's "don't throw the LLM baby out with the OpenAI bathwater". But it's pretty clear to me that OpenAI being bathwater is taken as near-fact.
It's what people write like when they think that using lots of big words and flowery phrasing makes them sound clever. It makes them sound like stuffy 15-year-olds who have just moved beyond looking up all the rude words in the dictionary.
They winced at repetition and predictability, and they let the reader experience their own emotion that followed.
As well intentioned as it is, these kind of edits subvert the author's intent -- and in this case, also erases evidence of a culture that uses apostrophes for quoting.
Its' greater sin in my view was attempting to present simple pedantry as politically relevant. The literary criticism I found enjoyable, convincing, and devoid of actionable political insight.
I think the French theorist Jean Baudrillard hit the nail on the head in the 1970s (Essay: In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities). He argued that modern media and technical systems neutralize political will through saturation. As a result, the public has essentially become a massive psychological black hole that absorbs political discourse and flattens it into inertia and apathy. The public is no longer a 'proletariat' or a political class that can be awakened; instead, the masses are a silent majority that will accept every iPhone upgrade or political speech and do nothing with it.
There's not going to be an uprising, few, if any will even put their phones down for a minute.
Especially because the ufo's they did "reveal" have always been known and acknowledged. The term ufo has always been a term of art, stolen by conspiracy theorists. What's been revealed has strengthened the term of art, not the conspiracy theorists. Why would anyone be interested in more of the same?
Right.
Like dinosaurs lost to mice, and like chimps lost to humans.