Prelude of "To Be Butlerian"

Please note that this post explores a hypothetical scenario. It should not be treated as advocating for any particular future, but rather as a stress-test of current social/economic policies and a philosophical thought experiment.

To preface, I first want to mention that I’ve not read past the original Dune (1984), at least not cover-to-cover, nor have I read the books comprising the expanded universe by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I like the world a lot, but I’m by no means an expert.

This shouldn’t matter for our purposes, however. The basis for this post follows the Butlerian Jihad as it’s described in the original hexalogy. This version of the war is not described as a particularly ‘hot’ war, but rather as a continuous struggle of the common man against other men that control machines. The result is a comprehensive halt and ban on the creation of artificial intelligence and/or autonomous robots; “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” This rule governs the known universe (to vary degrees of success) for thousands of years.

I’d also like to point out that this is not the first time that the Jihad has been invoked to write a post of this nature. Refer to “We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI” by Erik Hoel and “In Defense of a Butlerian Jihad” by sloonz for more prescriptive approaches. Or, you could consult Samuel Butler’s original works; Darwin Among the Machines being a good start.

In contrast to those works, I want to sidestep the question of “should we?” and instead straight to “what now?” We’ve enacted, by some counterfactual series of policy and economic decisions, to prohibit the creation of new artificial intelligence systems. Maybe we remain with whatever the most advanced language models were up and until that point, maybe their source code in frontier labs is deleted and bounties are placed on all cold storage, now contraband, versions. The details aren’t terribly important; we’ve already arrived there.

The rest… soon.