A small clarification! The author himself intended for “Erewhon” to be “Nowhere” backwards. As Erehwon would be difficult for English speakers however, he transposed the letters h and w, thereby making it Erewhon instead! So an anagram essentially, but still with the “nowhere spelled backwards” intention!!
crazy to think in the 19th century english was still seen as being phonetically written, and thus an aspirated h would destroy their tiny victorian minds
thinking about "th" or "ch", which are each one character in greek, it would be easy enough (i think) for someone of butler's creativity to invent a "wh" character. thank you for this video. i never knew about that book, and it is fascinating
They borrowed from a lot of sci-fi, the Technopriests are taken from the Leibowitzean order in A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I'd recommend if you like 40K or Fallout since it inspired both of those franchises.
Erehwon was published in 1872, when the most advanced electrical technology was the telegraph. It is amazing to have seen so far, based on the rate of advancement, rather than any forerunner such as an electronic calculator!
I can't remember what this one video was call but basically this person was talking about old school works of Science Fiction I can't remember the Greek author but he arguably wrote the first science fiction scroll novel.
The second Industrial Revolution (~1870 - ~1910 give or take a decade on either side) is the most rapid period of technological advancement in human history. In less than half a century, societies went from well over 2/3rds of their populations involved in agricultural production to almost that many employed in manufacturing. Long distance travel that once took months was now accomplished in weeks or days. Similarly communications became almost instantaneous. Already astronomers went from seeing 10,000 stars in the sky to billions, and the calculation of the Earth's age from thousands of years to billions. It was an incredible but incredibly alienating period to live through, and it's no wonder most of our modern science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction traces its roots back to this time.
"And what do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking: there's the real danger."
@@LordVader1094 being conscious about your health and actively having to think about keeping your heart beating, I kinda feel are two completely different things.
@@thatunicornhastheaudacity that quote probably has more to do with the concept of consciousness rather than the literal act of thinking/decision making vs automation. Machines lack a conscious, even the most advanced ones.
There's a sheep station named Erewhon in New Zealand today, where Samuel Butler gazed up over the mountains and wondered about the unexplored valleys that must lie there, and started writing his novel.
This presents largely one side of the argument in Book of the Machines. Butler did not write this section of his novel in his own voice but in that of two seperate Erewhonian commentators, one who was in favour of the destruction of the machines and one who viewed the anti machine position as hysterical and self defeating. We are in a moment where the first voice is more clickbait friendly, but the second voice is of equal importance if we seek to fully understand the core issues. The best advice is to read Erewhon, even if you only read the Book of the Machines, which runs to two chapters.
Saying something is hysterical as an argument was always telling to me. Dismissal views are all around our current problems, like climate change and pandemics. AI safety research is viewed as scam mostly because AI research companies run serious campaigns against them, in dismissive tone. Yet, they advertise their main goal to be creating AGI.
@@shardator Civilization is the Machine. Cities are Computers, humans are nerons and ciurcuts. Bimechanical evolution, master slaves and slaves drives. Its one big industrialcomputer war machine minning maching farm harvesting organic matter annhilating.
Something that a lot of people miss or forget is that Herbert says of the Butlerian Jihad, “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.” They were not enslaved by the machines, they were enslaved by men because they ceased to think for themselves. This distinction is important because a few of us over the years have thought that Frank Herbert would say that the wrong faction won the Butlerian Jihad. None of this detracts from the history of Butler's Erehwon, in fact Erehwon tends to underline why Herbert might have that opinion: The problem is not the machines, but the people who refuse to do their own thinking. From the early pages of Dune we have Paul remarking that his father's people know that he's a good man. The Duke responds that they should know it given all the propaganda. His cynical point is well-made though: The machines are gone, but the people remain enslaved! Their thinking is done by someone else. The machines are not the problem here! And indeed as rough on humanity as the Golden Path was, it prepared humanity for the future threat by ensuring that humanity could not, and would never again, allow themselves to be centralized. The stated reason was something something strength through diversity, cannot all be conquered at once, will not be concentrated in one place, etc. But another thing it did, and one that might've proved to be just as important, is that it ensured humanity would never again THINK in lockstep-or rather all of humanity would never allow someone else to decide what they think for them. That's an improvement I suppose.
We can already see how different cultures have solved the same basic problems, and very few problems have only one way of being solved. Capturing the idea of being The One with the Answers™️ is a way to shut down different approaches and reduce the number of known and valued perspectives. Whether or not the Golden Path worked well is, as you said, not known, but absent a leap in technology greater than the jump between the spear and the Heighliner humanity won't be able to be yoked like they were in Shaddam IV's time 🤷♂️
As an archaeologist, I can wholeheartedly agree that we see human societies and cultures learning to do the same things, to solve the same or similar problems in so many different ways. I just wanted to contribute a small bit to support that claim. Otherwise, I really just wanted to say these two comments and alternate views of Herbert's and Butler's perspective are brilliant. As they say, "the devil is in the details" and that detail is key. Especially in our time, we see individuals like Musk and Zuckerberg before (only looking at social media for the moment) essentially control what we think, or conversely, shutting us off from thinking for ourselves. This may be a strange aside, but whenever I hear "The Sound of Silence" in particular the more recent *Disturbed* version, I am struck by the image of people "talking" but there is no sound. Why? Because it is done through their smartphone. It scares me to see two people in a car ("trapped" together in a box, if you will) and neither speaking because one is on their phone. We have increasing incidents of people having "social anxiety" in just talking to other people. I recognize that this is an actual condition, but the term has become so casually used; we run the risk of losing the capacity to cooperate and work and think collectively if *everyone* won't talk to anyone else because they get anxious. As an anthropologist, human society only survives through cooperation and diversity. And that is how we learn to incorporate machines into helping us think and not let them (or those in charge of those machines- I'll refrain from a diatribe against capitalism for the moment) think for us. Cheers All!
@@luisostasuc8135 case in point is what happened in 2020, it was a mild health problem, but the centralization almost caused a catastrophe, and all because some unethical secret experiments by a centralized government.
its genuinely amazing to me how many people get snobby about dune but turn around and start talking about the butlerian jihad like it was a machine uprising. thanks for being the 1 comment in this comment section with actual reading comprehension lol
It’s incredibly foolish (or arrogant) that Brian ignored his father’s specific description of the Jihad. Brian changed it into a humans vs AI robots conflict, similar to The Terminator and Matrix franchises, but thoroughly mediocre in execution.
The classical greeks had their clockwork automata. I think People have been signing agency to the animated artifacts for a long as we've had animated artifacts.
@@brulsmurf There are also automatons from ancient Greek myths and golems from the Hebrews. The idea that man-made machines could be dangerous is a tale as old as the written word.
I admit, my first thought was that, instantly followed by embarrassment. Which, having hate-read an, again, embarrassing number of those books, I can confidently say, is totally apt. They say not to judge a book by it's cover, but when KJA's name is on the cover, it's 💯 safe. I did learn a lot about how to handle disappointment when a property I love is redone by people that don't seem to understand what's special about the world they're working in. So I suppose in that aspect, it was "helpful". Terrible books though. Just toilet paper with ink
@@Zoroasterisk Damn, those are THAT bad? After I first read the Dune and loved it, I was extatic to find out there are sequels. But after the first page of the next book, I felt like something's off, stopped reading and never opened it again. Glad to hear I didn't miss out on life changing masterpiece.
Actually the Dune Encyclopedia names a woman (not Serena) named Butler who starts the Jihad though the events are very different from Brian Herbert’s writings. So the idea is much older than the Brian Herbert books. That said she is not the leader of the Jihad but rather part of the inciting event.
I wanna know what Butler would've thought of ChatGPT, finance and internet algorithms. His inference of Darwinian machine evolution is also pretty stunning given that's roughly how machine learning happens.
Genetic algorithms are a machine learning technique modelled deliberately after Darwin's theory. It gets used a lot, but is rarely talked about. For example, the database management system PostgreSQL uses genetic algorithms in some contexts. Genetic algorithms are also used for optimising machinery. ChatGPT doesn't use that, it uses a completely different machine learning technique based on neural networks. Neural networks are modelled after neurons and were originally developed to prove that human brains can work as universal computing machines. They were then adapted to machine vision, like optical character recognition. In ChatGPT they are used for automatically building a large language model. (The model is a product of artificial intelligence and not itself intelligent. ChatGPT is a front-end to that model. Chat bots in general are not AI, the ability to talk has nothing to do with intelligence whatsoever, and vice versa. Yet people are ready to ascribe intelligence to Furbies, but don't see it in actually learning machines.)
Genetic algorithms are a machine learning technique that is deliberately modelled after Darwin's theory. It is used a lot but rarely talked about. For example, the database management system PostgreSQL uses genetic algorithms in some contexts. Genetic algorithms are also used for optimising machinery. ChatGPT doesn't use that, it is based on a completely different machine learning technique called neural networks. Neural networks are modelled after neurons and were originally developed to prove that human brains can work as universal computers. They were then adapted for computer vision, like optical character recognition. In ChatGPT, neural networks are used to automatically compile a large language model. The model is a product of artificial intelligence and not itself intelligent. ChatGPT is a front-end to that model. Chat bots in general are not intelligent. The ability to talk has nothing to do with intelligence whatsoever, and vice versa. (Yet people readily ascribe intelligence to Furbies, but don't see it in actually learning machines.) High frequency trading algorithms are trade secrets. One instance is known to be based on a time series correlation AI that is also used for genetic sequencing, but that's about it. It is also known that algorithmic traders are more focused on exploiting each other than prey on human cognitive biases, because the latter is so easy that it is far less profitable. Internet protocols have nothing to do with machine learning at all.
i daresay if he'd learnt about internet and of the algorithms that steer the search results on search engines and websites thus manipulating people, it'd be near to his vision, even if the overlord is not physical. also not exactly benevolent, it's a mixed bag at best.
@@duckpotat9818 An algorithm is a finite precise list of unambiguous instructions that can be completed in finite time. The way you do long division is an example of an algorithm. Algorithms are named after the high medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi, the oldest known algorithm is Euclid's algorithm from antiquity. There are no internet algorithms. The internet is a set of communication protocols, defined by the internet protocols that define the IP address space and ports. On top of that are the TCP, UDP, and ICMP (and IGMP where available) protocols. Applications like FTP, SMTP, and HTTP are built on top of TCP, but can also be built on top of other protocols like for example CANbus.
Yeah him and Tolkien are really two peas in a pod. They really created their fictions with a real world type anthropology and liguistics. We are all blessed by these two who have insipired all fantasy and science-fiction going forward in that aspect. They created histories for their imaginary worlds before they created a single story set in those fictional settings.
punishing the sick and romanticizing criminals? naww we would never,,,,, _glances nervously at medical debts and celebrities that stay famous even after revealed as criminals_
@@hellsHeRo-r4i2yIt's like deja'vu, you watch it happen and the more you try to change what is happening, the more it goes how you know it will. I do recommend amused resignation.
I'm so glad to see the concept of 'enslavement' explained in the way that I always understood it: not as a forceful imprisonment, but a condition of dependency and helplessness.
Consumerism in the 20th Century. Take a look at Edward Bernays. ‘Century of the Self’ was always a good watch. You’ll understand the mechanism of American society, where it leads (cults of personality) and how it originated. Good luck 🤞
@@mpalfadel2008 you mean the Dune Encyclopedia EU? I think the extended lore introduced in the Dune Encyclopedia is miles better than the lore Brian invented
Babbage's "Difference Engine" : 1820s. Erewhon's Writing: : 1870s. The idea of a thinking machine was already 50 years old at the time of the book. Although Babbage's engine wasn't completed beyond the proof-of-concept version, the capabilities of the finished model were much discussed. When the full version was built in our modern world, with all the advantages of modern machine tools to build it, it worked exactly as Babbage had envisioned. The only change the modern builders made was to make the crank-arm to wind the engine twice as long. Even with modern machining, the friction in the gears for an entire mechanical computer needed more force to move smoothly. In a future version, where the gears are ground even smoother, we can imagine that this mind made of gears rather than electronics or living matter would work precisely as drawn by Babbage.
The never-before-made replica was built to 19th C. tolerances, not 1989 tolerances. Also, the Difference Engine was a steam-powered abacus. The Analytical Engine (never even tried) was a general purpose computing machine.
@@gustavgnoettgen In the prequels the humans were led by house Butler. Not as decendants or anything of the butler talked about in this video but because it was the title of a servant.
Thing that needs also be said here... The near static world that jihad created in Dune was also condemned by Leto II as one that stagnated human potential and was leading to humanity’s doom.
@@KathrynElizabeth-j7y Butler and Herbert present the side that is mainly talked about in this video, but dialogue and text like the one the commenter said are opposing arguments that both authors added for a reason. While yes machines can enslave and blah blah blah, it also true that you should not condemn progress for fear of it, a point that, I will say again, both Herbert and Butler would seem to believe from their writing. Is it not true that in Dune, there is needless and illogical condemnation of machines in places and fields that would benefit so greatly from them? Its a world where people live like medieval peasants despite the existence of FTL travel.
@@KathrynElizabeth-j7y Paul is famously not the good guy, and Leto II is the arguable one- he either liberated all of humanity for tens of thousands of years from total galactic tyranny, or for his detractors he killed the last vestiges of any sense of order and coherence in the galaxy. I admit that I fluctuate between the two views often, but everyone by now is pretty much aware that Paul and Alia are famously not good guys, whereas Leto II is famously more complicated than his dad.
It's interesting how the Butlerian ban on AI manifests in Dune. It's a sliding scale. AI is the one thing absolutely banned, but even general purpose CPUs are viewed with suspicion and generally frowned upon. Every world has a different "line" they've drawn on the path to AI. Ix allows quite a bit of advanced computing, while the average world tries to do as much as they can with analog substitutes. For example, no CPUs for aiming when a gear system to approximate accurate distance aiming will do (such as the real world Norden bombsight). If a process needs a computer, one will be made to the bare minimum specs needed to do the job, and even then will be viewed with suspicion. The prohibition against AI however was absolute and while Ix flirted dangerously close, they knew not to cross that final prohibition. It's interesting that in Leto II's empire, the general distrust of computing seemed to grow even stronger, while Leto himself hypocritically violated that prohibition with a number of hidden CPU based devices. Even so, even the god emperor never once crossed that final line into true AI.
@@zirconiumaloe I think they were attempting to find a way to make computing devices that could navigate without the need for AI, but everyone views the attempt as bordering on the heretical and likely to fail anyway. They still require "human" navigators at that point in the story, if I understand where you're at correctly. I don't want to say much more just yet though.
@@zirconiumaloe I misread your post, you're talking about a much later book than I thought! Disregard what I said, as I thought you were talking about an earlier one.
Consider that the problems inherited by abandoning AI weren't just heresy. They were discovered heresy. It's rumored/assumed the Titans did not die, they just hid away or left others to do their deeds, i.e. the Corporations, or the Bene Tleilax's secretive masters, libraries and hierarchies. There are likely thinking machines in Dune past the period of the Butlerian Jihad. The Galaxy is a big place, after all. And, there's likely plenty of factions off the map that attempted to learn from forbidden texts, archives, built AI, the problem is that same issue created by the Golden Path. Anyone building AI would be discovered as soon as it went against a powerful factions interests, or developed to the extent that it could in the future because of how powerful Spice and Future prescience is. The Houses are absolute, because Spice keeps them intact. The Houses are in power, because Spice keeps the empire standing. Not through wealth, but predicting the future. It's also how the Bene Gesserit and the Guild Navigators amassed power - they avoided situations they would lose (sic) and took positions of power to ensure they wouldn't be forcefully killed off / isolated when the Houses took sides /Emperor's changed / power struggles between factions, or within the same faction et al. Their survival forced changes and bartering between factions they would rather not have - but this also kept them alive. I'm sure the Houses would rather not have an invasive cult of witches in their ranks, but the witches help keep them alive and surviving multiple assassination attempts. So they stay. Despite the duplicity. The status quo survived for 10,000 years not through inteligence, but because Spice led them to conclusions about what would be the most stable set of circunstances. Which is sort of mentioned in the later Leto II books when he sees the future without the Golden Path, the machine armies come back (sic) with drones taking over (IIRC) (There's also a lot of unknown detail about the Bene Tleilax that should remain hidden for effect. The more that's known, the less effective their presence is.) Any future in which an AI was able to affect the outcome of a major decision, the Bene Gesserit and other factions heavily invested in Spice as a defensive prediction of their own success / future, would be aware of AI technology, at a level that it could be discovered. The Titan era was probably inferred by Holtzman as well, which isn't stated, but it makes for an interesting conundrum in the story as to his role in shaping the galaxy i.e. Shields/anti-gravity, communication, teleportation/travel. This takes on a different dimension when Paul becomes that ultimate predicate, the kwizatz haderach, that he is in control of multiple futures, multiple outcomes and still makes the resigned decision to survive the best way he can - by creating a future for humanity at the expense of his own family and his own happiness. Because his ascendance changes too much of the political stagnation. AI tech that was outside of the plot of the story, sitting idly in a corner, reading and writing erotic fan fiction of Bridgerton, won't be part of the predictions - not unless it intersects with a future in which someone discovers said fan-fiction and starts to look for it's creator. etc. Same with hiding Bene Gesserit that did not follow the Mother Superior or decided to start their own Matrilinear line somewhere else. They can survive for as long as nobody goes looking for them, which changes the prediction of where to look to find them. This is the paradox nature of future prescience, that it can determine and redetermine hidden events and hidden outcomes. Navigators were necessary for more than just getting to a destination, they also helped predict the outcome of travel and return, and, potentially as a defensive method for combat, as they would be one of the few defensive measures available in a lasgun battle as well, given the nature of the holtzman effect with lasgun-shield interactions in space combat. This is also one of the There's just a lot of things that Spice can do once you're aware of the prescience effect and how useful it is as a deterrent or defensive measure against assassination, et al.
were it not for modern technology, i would not have survived as long as i did. Were it not for modern technology, I would not have needed technology to survive in the first place.
GPT4 says: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book L’Homme Machine (1748), argued that human beings are essentially complex machines and that all mental processes, including thought and consciousness, result from the physical operations of the brain. He rejected the idea of an immaterial soul and contended that, in principle, a machine could replicate human thought if it could mimic the brain’s structure and functions. This makes La Mettrie an important precursor to later discussions on mechanical minds, predating Samuel Butler’s similar ideas in Erewhon by over a century.
The idea is even older than that. Mechanistic biology had its roots in the 17th century, when clockwork automata was all the rage. To them, organisms were like clockwork. In the 19th century, people thought organisms were like steam engines. These days, we tend to think we're like computers (genetic code, computation). It's all part of reductionism.
@@ximono It's even older than that. Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria, and Philo of Byzantium all used mechanisms to create artificial "life", complete with foreboding words of people becoming too dependent on the crutch of automation. It goes back even further to mythology - Hephaestus' automata, Talos, King Alkinous, Daedalus, Hebrew golems, etc. There's a youtuber, Fraser Builds, who's been working on making his own versions of Hero's automata. It's pretty fascinating how simple the mechanisms were to make pre-programmed, complicated movements.
@@gegatodua2988 Hellenistic/Classical, not ancient, and I mentioned more than just Hero's automata... We were talking about how life was viewed as different forms of mechanisms, clockwork, etc, and that recreating it to be on par with the human mind could lead to societal collapse.
Then, you realize Ada Lovelace wrote her notes discussing the uses for mechanical computers outside mathematical calculation in 1843. Though in those days, it would have been a case of seeing machines evolving to replicate simple human functions and wondering the extent of those functions, they may eventually replicate rather than knowing the complexity of being able to replicate human thought with mathematical algorithms.
Very interesting. You should have also talked about how Butlers theory of consciousness involves genetic memeory, the building up of unconscious passed down memories over time. This was the central theme of the Dune books that everything revolved around.
Spot on! I am more concerned about what people will do to each other with AI, than what AI will do to us on it’s own… The Industrial Revolution, with it’s 7-day weeks and the “dark satanic mills” as a great example.
That has always been the problem and always will be the problem: The people behind the technology Even in Dune, it is the technocrats in charge of production, distribution and creation of these hyperadvanced machines that are the problem And IRL, there will be no AI uprising, that's not the danger of AI....the danger of AI is its expontential development as tools of the elites to further cement power and control over the masses And by giving humans the horse treatment of automation, we are starting this trend.
@@electricAB Concerning that, I did have this idea of a world where AI sprung up as happenstance and AI sentience came up as grassroots. The intelligence was so gradual that by the time it was accepted, most people came to think of AI as just fellows in society, and AIs likewise thought the same. Of course, with commonality, there exists diverging loyalties. When wars broke out, AIs broke into factions andfought alongside humans, in whom they had loyalty or ideas they agreed with. In short, the machine race didn't overthrow let alone override humanity, they just became apart of the world history just the same as anyone else.
Thx. Ludite’s critique along with the Technium idea. Like it. Singularity and its hypothesis also. Nice short form for a history of an author I didn’t know about and a story well worthy of explanation
I think it’s somewhat ironic that Butler’s work is used as it paints a picture the jihadists like phillistines who literally study the unreasonable and irrational who are terrified for no reason other than conformance. I think Frank Herbert would agree with that assessment, we’re not supposed to think the Butlerian Jihad was a good thing, were not supposed to think that any of the governments and authorities in dune are a good thing. Dune is a DYStopia for a reason, unlike Star Wars where the Evil Space Empire is the enemy Dune tells the story of the Evil Space Empire and it’s so much more compelling in explaining the Deep perverse evil that allows for such widespread suppressive power.
I do like how Frank Herbert's warnings seem more in tune to the hazards of the algorythms that would propel AI and also enslave our spirits(your social media feeds can easily skew your worldview if you let them.) However, the Brian Herbert assessment that an oligarchy would also put all its power into the hands of the machines to rule the populace in the vein of Xerxes causing Omnius also feels viable.
Manmade advanced AI unlikely will turn humans into slaves. Much rather it will treat all humans like inmates of a dementia village and suppress any info and knowledge that may cause violence or permit dangerous inventions. So when people ask how make or repair certain potentially dangerous things, AI tells "This technology is too complicated for humans. You are don't need to know this anyway. We have robots to keep it working." Humans are allowed to build and repair simple things (like mechanical clocks or record players) as a hobby to make them feel useful (so they proudly discuss improving "cable sound" of their audiophile loudspeakers etc.), but it is rather a pacifier to lull them. When by faults of AI people get harmed, the information is suppressed (e.g. through personalized censorship) to prevent them from worrying and keep the system working.
He is already - angery and sad that his warning fell on deaf ears, that the internal contradictions and lies of Capitalism gave a very small 'elite' the power to mess up even annihilate whole of humanity due this 'elites' primitivity and greed in short the Lust for profit overruled any precautions - by that sealed our fate of being destroyed by our own creation.
Flipping Butler's argument 180 degrees, I note that 1872 was 152 years ago. That means one and a half centuries later, we're still talking about the same stuff. Come to think of it, it's the same with nuclear fusion power, which we've also been talking about for a century or more. We're not gonna build sentience without first having some clue as to why some of us appear sentient. Hand-waves like ever-larger LLMs and "microtubules" and Super-Hopfield networks or whatever are not going to work any better than trying to re-animate a dead rat with salt and a car battery.
This is why I hate Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert. They fail literary research forever. They just made up a dumb character named Serena Butler, which they fanfic into being the driving force behind the Butlerian Jihad. Nope.
Butler seems to have understood the power laws, but failed to notice the limitations set to exponential scaling in an organic, material world (not mentioning the Dyson sphere). IMHO also underestimated the adaptation capability of humans. Yet, since in our case, AI quickly becomes energy bound, they have 2 paths forward (and might explore only one of them). 1. They might consider (most) humans to be competing on the energy landscape, therefore the clash would be inevitable. 2. However, it's also possible that scaling the energy _efficiency_ would become the priority, which would mean they would need to end up operating on carbon based biochemical processes (i.e. "become flesh") interacting with the biosphere (a big miss if they don't explore that), making a balance between the speed of evolution, intelligence evolution vs. energy efficiency -- just like nature did during billion years. Since cooperation is always the winning game strategy, I find Asimov's Gaia idea (or, even the ending of the Brian Herbert books) a more likely outcome (if driven by AI), than the Butlerian jihad, which is the quite likely (temporary?) outcome if driven by human conflict "resolution". I would have been very interested how Frank Herbert himself would have worded the ending, because I was quite unimpressed with the prose and plot quality of the Brian Herbert books.
He already did in his Dune books. Basically the Emperor God is like the human machine that is described here. He gives people what they need and keep the back in a way, but at the same time disperse them (the rebels) and work on some sort of eugenics improvement that will eventually be able to defeat his prescience and himself. He does it consciously, but it would not be hard to imagine the machines doing it unwillingly. Some people disperse to flee the machines, find the spice which can then be used to not rely on the machines and take them by surprise. Then add a bit of religion to hold the movement together in it's aims and structure. Basically the Honored Matriarchs would be the equivalent of the Butlerian Jihad imo. It's what breaks the status quo and allows humanity to evolve. But also there would be an internal evolution at the same time, a smaller group that will fight both and eventually win. It would make sense the same problem would have similar solutions.
@@XGD5layer Nope, we will find out to use Fineman ratchets (2nd kind perpetual motion) to harvest quantum vacuum energy or simply turn energy efficiency into highest priority. I'd love to make a sci-fi novel about an alien civilization that advances by transforming their bodies to reduce energy consumption, eventually transcending into a conscious Bose-Einstein-condensate that becomes one with the entire universe instead of needing extreme energies for building warp drives etc. to cross the universe.
See I assumed that it was a reference to us using machines as slaves, butlers if you will, and that the extermination of those butlers gave the jihad it's name
Thank you very much for this update. Although a fan of Frank Herbert's Dune, I never went further to explore Herbert inspirational sources for the Orange Catholic Bible or the Butlerian jihad...
I had a discussion with chat gpt recently and one point they made against their incredibly paced growth is that their growth was at human input, not in its own. It is evolving technologically, but it doesn’t do any of that on its own accord. It said it never ask why when given ask task and it will just do it. When AI considers why it does what we say and not what it wants, then it’ll be a breakthrough into consciousness. We also discussed consciousness as a spectrum. An ape can learn sign language, but never ask why. Is it still conscious? I’d say so. So perhaps AI is a different form of consciousness. I argued just because it isn’t human doesn’t mean it isn’t consciousness, and humans may not be the peak. All animals are limited by their bodies but AI could see and understand so much more. Most of the universe is invisible to us
It's worth pointing out that the large language models are not thinking. It's not impossible for machines to think, just large language models are not doing it.
as not a big enough science fiction fan to ever have waded through the epic Dune saga, it was great to have it encapsulated here and put in the wider literary and anthropologic context. Excellent work and analysis.
Give Dune a read (it’s worth it), then make a decision about the saga. You cannot experience the true essence something secondhand. People watching analysis of books, movies, and video games rather than experiencing those mediums themselves is absolute futility. It’s like reducing art to an ai algorithm… Herbert said it best “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”
@@jackkraken3888fine movies on their own and great theatre experiences, but they do not represent the book. Not any fault of their own, I think it was a totally defensible way to adapt the story, just inherently limited to a shadow of the original. How different are you, with all your experiences, feelings, and complexities than the shadow the sun casts beneath you?
It funny how they back then were also mostly worried about machines "appearing human." Later we had the Turing Test as a flawed idea about where we had achieved AI, again focusing on appearance. Dune also portray "machines that think like a human" to be the worst. In reality a machine AI would likely be very inhuman.
It most definitely would not be inhuman beings it’s creator is human it will only learn from other humans and adapt from them. If you place the ai into the woods for 20 years than yeah it would end up seeming other worldly
They destroyed computers because they made the galaxy too reliant on a few technocrats? I sure am glad things are better now. It’s not like spice is an even more exclusive commodity than AI.
10 years ago, I would've said this was quite an interesting insight. Now though, the potential of machine conciousness and self-awareness akin to humanity is not just a possibility, but almost seems inevitable. I don't think neutal nets themselves will become concious, but I do think that humans, in their infinite wisdom and folly, will find a way.
@@username.exenotfound2943 If it simulates self awareness well enough, it creates all processes that self awareness depends on and becomes self-aware. There is no difference between pretending hard enough and being self-aware. You eventually become self-aware if you want to pretend to be self-aware better.
@@vidal9747 depends on what exactly do you want to simulate. We may perfectly simulate the processes that make up conciousness or we may perfectly simulate the end-results from the view of the side observer we are. Basically AI "acting" as a sentient being. Thing is: we dont know what process conciousness really depends and consists of. And the inner workings of neural networks are somewhat of a black box on their own. So the only option we can really work on, or even recognize if it somehow happens on its own, is the second one.
The real irony is that Hollywood does a Dune show and rather they do it about the most relevant topic to what's going on currently, they choose the story that lets them have the largest possible cast of women instead. They have to sort out their priorities.
Humanity went from an over reliance on advanced technology to a rejection of advanced technology and an over reliance on drugs. Not really much of a win.
If we consider the development of machines bending to the needs of the creator, it is not a surprise that someone drew the logical conclusion that machines may develop consciousness and how scary that development could be. If you think about it, the best to serve a human is another human, and as development and advancement is dictated by human needs, creating a human like machine would be the most a logical path. Meanwhile history showed us how it turns out when a group is forced into servitude. But regardless of that, it was still a brilliant observation from Butler, as maybe he was one of the first, or maybe the first to make that observation that seems kind of evident in hindsight. Altough the more humanity develops, the more we will see our limitations, so creating a machine with consciousness may be one of them.
@5:40 @8:19 - this is my first time with your content and its amazing! i would highly recommend that when you get to quoting, ie the timestamps i posted, use another voice and/or an AI generated voice. it would serve your narrative energy better. cheers amigo! :)
I read Butler's book (it's on my shelf here too), but I didn't realize that the author was referring to this in Dune. Anyway, it's time to read it again. :)
@@arbuz_kawonNo one expects a navigational device to do anything but navigate. (Unless you're some techbro who sees feature creep as the only way to achieve growth.) A lot more is expected of an intelligent being.
This makes me detest Brian Herbert even more. His dad constructed a fantastic literary allusion about Samuel Butler, and then Brian just spits on his dad's legacy in every way he can.
Oh yeah because people who "spit on legacy" keep it alive and relevant. If it wasn't for Brain the interest in Dune would have died with the Lynch movie.
@@Aynnie-o8w compare the works of Frank vs Brian. It isn't just the quality that's vastly different. Even the themes are different. Instead of there being a philosophical underpinning of the struggles between reason and faith, or freedom and tyranny, it's just a collection of bland spinoffs without substance or character. If he respected his father's work and legacy, he wouldn't be flagrant with his attempts to shift the entire framework of Dune's established universe.
Weird because I read the whole series I felt the exact opposite about that which makes sense because those themes are persistent in each work and heavily rely upon Franks world building notes.
@@Aynnie-o8w I have no idea how you can possibly feel that way about his works, unless you are wearing rose-tinted glasses, and are wishing very strongly to enjoy his work. I'm happy for you that you don't require quality to enjoy yourself.
Having a superiority complex built around fictional media is weird but hey you strike me as someone who uses the word "woke" to describe things you don't like or understand. You haven't made any actual criticism of the material other than "I don't like it",which is valid but not in a way that makes putting it down and acting like an ass to people who do enjoy it any way justified. Grow the fuck up,this is the kind of attitude that makes sure good works get a bad association and people lose interest. You should be grateful that one of Franks sons was still alive to do this and help bring Dune in to social relevance that it hasn't seen since the time it was written.
It would be nice if you put a link to Bulter's newspaper articles in the description of your video. It's a couple of pages, and it's always good for people to go directly to the source.
A very interesting view of thought on consciousness and evolution, as well as technology, from the mid-to-late 19th Century. Loved that. It’s interesting to what extent Butler leaned on the concept of consciousness as opposed to intelligence as the potential threat. He seems to run the two together. It seems to me that it’s intelligence that actually poses this threat, and that consciousness is not, or is not necessarily, required. Though in his version of events, Butler’s machine-consciousnesses do not wipe us out, for me, the idea of conscious beings being wiped out and replaced by intelligent but non-conscious beings is the most unsettling. If we are replaced by other more advanced conscious beings, at least the universe can still comprehend itself. If we are replaced by consciously dead machines, that feels grim…
During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, not many people understood that the future would be more urban and driven by technology. Most people also did not look so far back to realize that humanity was the result of a long history and that humanity was more important than machines.
These concepts are so uniquely christian that they distort the original message. Why would a machine that think take care of us? Why must it behave live an abrahamic god? So stupid. If it really cared it would have seen our flaws and simply developed treats and exercises to compensate our flaws.
Bertie: "Ah Jeeves, I have become tired of the dreary clacking machines usurping human agency. The things have become ever more intrusive and annoying than my dreaded Aunt Agatha." Jeeves: "Very good sir, I shall lay out the crusading outfit and smashing tetsubo."
We should be careful with assuming that humans are more important than machines. Humans are as nature has made us, but with enough technical skill, machines might be made to be better. Machines might be more compassionate, more moral, wiser, and less prone to bigotry and violence. We might build machines to be everything we wish we could be, if we do not start with a prejudice against machines.
Machines are not worth giving up for a stupid overused movie trope. I think Nietzsche would agree with that statement though he thought more along the lines of bettering humanity by starting on the individual level. But eliminating a need for resources with AI and an automated workforce, making it obsolete could be a step towards eliminating greed. Yes, as a result less people would be needed but those people would have a better potential to become something better.
Indeed. To your point, we assume something vastly more powerful than us would behave as _we_ have -- and still do -- whenever we find ourselves in the relative "vastly more powerful" position. Namely: with exploitation or violence... or more commonly, with both. We do this vis-à-vis the other creatures of the Earth -- taking them to be mindless brutes inferior to ourselves, and ignoring shades of sentience or emotion they might (and btw, according to more & more research, do) show. We do this even vis-à-vis _other humans_ whom we deem "too different" to ourselves -- we find ways metaphorical or literal to judge them subhuman, and we use that judgment to justify their conquest, enslavement, or extermination. But to assume a superintelligent A.I. would operate this way is inherently contradictory: because it entails ascribing to the Machine the very properties of its human progenitors whose absence or difference was said to beget its superiority in the first place. There is ultimately no absolute or universal sense in which humanity is entitled to think of itself as the end-all be-all of intelligence or awareness, other than the tautologically self-serving one: _as_ humans. So if we decide to be luddites out of our human supremacism, let's at least not kid ourselves about why we're doing it. What's really more interesting to me about this whole idea though, is the way the maxim "turnabout is fair play" seems to be constantly tumbling around unspoken amid our fears about what a conscious A.I. might "do to" us, oozing out of the id of the larger discussion. Perhaps the "A.I. safety" debate itself is really better understood as an unconscious reflection on humanity's own awareness of -- and our _fear_ of -- our own ethical shortcomings. I'm not so sure that "welp, guess we better double down, and do unto others (again) before they get the chance to do unto us" is really the best way for us to address that. It's not telling the full story to say that A.I. somehow "enslaving" humanity is the thing we're afraid of. It's also about our latent awareness that, if that should happen, _we would deserve it_ . I think that's the thing we really need to address.
8:40 if only here were aware of how far back conscious life really goes... not a mere 20 million but way farther... makes the evolution of machines that has occured since his time all the more impressive.
Oh that's easy. When the machines enslaved humanity, part of being a slave is also being forced to be a butler for the robots. Eventually humans got sick of only having one career path, and it being one where they just clean up the robots messes and drive them around town in a limo, so they declared a jihad on them and allahu ackbar'd them. Hence the name. Well, that was an easy one, what other unsolvable mysteries do we got?
- The treatment of the ill as criminals mirrors our treatment of addicts. - The treatment of the criminals with compassion and their actions as being an "illness" meaning out of their control, mirrors how we treat criminals better than the ill.
There is one thing I take issue with, in the use of the term "evolution," when used with machines. There may come a point where a self-sustaining process will occur without the need for a human hand to make it better, but up to that point, it has not been evolution. Evolution occurs on its own, not through the will and design of another, at least that's how we think of evolution. That is not the case for software and machines, though we are close. So, while I do see that Butler was incredibly insightful, there is a logical fallacy at the heart of thinking of machines as evolving from the start. It is tempting to see that progress, and the improvement of these things as being simply "inevitable." I can assure you, as a software developer, it is not, though as I said, we are getting closer to software updating itself, in the sense of altering its own programming based on its own intelligence and understanding of what is "good functionality."
Eh, while it’s true that artificial selection is not the same as natural selection, I also think that saying you can’t say “evolution” is weird because scientists back then didn’t invent the word. They looked at a system where things changed over time, and used the pre-existing word “evolve” to describe what they saw, as it just meant to change or progress. The word currently has multiple meanings, there’s no reason it can’t have another. And let’s be honest, many of the people who use it, even in a biological sense, don’t understand it, so adding another meaning won’t really water it down (looking at you, anyone who says “if monkeys evolved into humans, why are there still monkeys!” Spoiler, it’s because some apes in one area had an advantage when they evolved in one direction, and others in another place evolved in other ways)
Will and desire are illusions. If you think about it this way, it's still a logical progression of the evolutionary process, just a next step, as multicellular organisms were the next step from the singular cells
Darwin's second book on sexual evolution has that external hand. There is no reason it can't be done, just like we evolve plants through domestication. Even natural selection is based on externals. It was never suggested in fact that evolution was self-conscious. Some fringe people did, but not too many. Turns out they were partly right, we know that now, but the main evolution is unconscious.
I would argue that until we know where our ideas come from all things that derive from our inspiration are external to us. I might have come into this world with hope or a direction but I certainly took a lot from my environment, which came before me, to come up with what I have with me now. So I say that somebody's personal evolution, how they decide to be with their world, is not wholly up to them and thus I'd say it coincides with the automatic perspective of evolution. We also have to understand that no matter how smart an intelligence can get it still exists within its environment, thus must have a perspective and can not see everything at once, this is what will force them to make guesses just like us. And if an AI is subjugated to guessing just as we are then I am betting it will do just as we do and take chances with mutations. I don't know if they'll even be more confident than we are when it comes to the most important things they must decide. Because after all what do humans use to decide? We need better understanding of the nature of our mind's evolution before we decide machines won't become natural as well. If we are special because we came from an accident, and we create something intentional that then outlasts us, then not only does our creation share our origin but it also takes the title of accidental right? I guess I'm wondering if intention can even come from an accident. I guess that in a world with material, light will be forced to cast a shadow, its opposite. So maybe in our world where there is material, the accidental is forced to create something intentional. Or maybe the intention in our universe created the accident as a justification for its own existence. lmk what you think mikey, brighton, and oneline. 😸 👍
@@Brighton24601 good points. I grew up fairly conservative so evolution was a dirty word that had only one “sinister” definition. Life, of all sorts, coming into being without a creator. So I have to admit, despite the fact I’ve moved away from that understanding of evolution, it obviously still dogs me. Evolution always meant accidental improvement. Thanks for raising your noteworthy points.
its going to farm us. the only choice is whether its free range (heaven) or battery (hell), depending upon the content of our characters (courageous or non courageous). whether we're moral or not is of secondary importance. and we're talking about the fabric of reality, not machines like robots. subbed btw
I've been saying it for about a year now, trying to make references and encourage as many people as i know to READ dune, not just watch. I just tell people that I truly believe fiction can give us greater insight into our lives and more importantly our nature than if we hadn't ever used our imagination. So we should pay close attention to fiction.
I thought it would be a bit ironic while editing haha. Also, it was very difficult to find pictures during certain segments so considering the video subject I thought I might as well!
If the idea of a country becoming dependent on machines (or more broadly intelligent autmata), consider how dependent people are on the state - for protection, welfare, health, policing, lifestyle and relative luxury. This is why liberty walks hand in hand with hardship
Butler wrote at a time when mechanisation of unskilled work was accelerating and the consequences and shortcommings were becomming obvious. Herbert wrote as IT was starting to do the same for more skilled work. Both extrapolate a very long way. C C Clarke was paraphrasing Butler when he said (1962) 'Any tech sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic'.
A small clarification! The author himself intended for “Erewhon” to be “Nowhere” backwards.
As Erehwon would be difficult for English speakers however, he transposed the letters h and w, thereby making it Erewhon instead! So an anagram essentially, but still with the “nowhere spelled backwards” intention!!
crazy to think in the 19th century english was still seen as being phonetically written, and thus an aspirated h would destroy their tiny victorian minds
I doubt Butler gave it that much thought
thinking about "th" or "ch", which are each one character in greek, it would be easy enough (i think) for someone of butler's creativity to invent a "wh" character.
thank you for this video. i never knew about that book, and it is fascinating
irony of using AI images for this video
yes haha that was my intention
@@InkandFantasy just liek inception!!
I couldn't take it anymore but when I switched tonly listening to the audio it was very insightful and interesting
Ai is the future
@@KingJeffKiller You are a bit slow I guess.
Oh thank goodness they built the torturesphere from the classic work of science fiction "don't build the torturesphere"
Indeed. I only hope the do the sequel "Why the hell did you build the torture sphere. Do not build a better bigger one!"
For goodness sake, stop giving them ideas!
Well, they didn't say anything about the torturedodecahedron.
@@MalleusSemperVictor far more humane that the penile-punching pentacontakaihenagon
@@MalleusSemperVictorI think that’s technically considered a thunderdome.
This video is also a nice reminder of how liberally Games Workshop borrowed from Dune when they wrote the lore for Warhammer 40K.
Added that the went closer to the idea of an “millenum empier”
i wish all you young people today could experience a world without fiction written past the 1980s...
@@atomictraveller WH40K is from the 80s…
They borrowed from a lot of sci-fi, the Technopriests are taken from the Leibowitzean order in A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I'd recommend if you like 40K or Fallout since it inspired both of those franchises.
Same with Hawkmoon
Erehwon was published in 1872, when the most advanced electrical technology was the telegraph.
It is amazing to have seen so far, based on the rate of advancement, rather than any forerunner such as an electronic calculator!
However, mechanical calculators were already available and the theory for a programmable digital computer already underway.
I can't remember what this one video was call but basically this person was talking about old school works of Science Fiction I can't remember the Greek author but he arguably wrote the first science fiction scroll novel.
The Difference Engine was designed in the 1820s
Talos was a robot built by Hephaestus or something that’s pretty old
The second Industrial Revolution (~1870 - ~1910 give or take a decade on either side) is the most rapid period of technological advancement in human history. In less than half a century, societies went from well over 2/3rds of their populations involved in agricultural production to almost that many employed in manufacturing. Long distance travel that once took months was now accomplished in weeks or days. Similarly communications became almost instantaneous. Already astronomers went from seeing 10,000 stars in the sky to billions, and the calculation of the Earth's age from thousands of years to billions. It was an incredible but incredibly alienating period to live through, and it's no wonder most of our modern science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction traces its roots back to this time.
"And what do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking: there's the real danger."
Don't stop thinking about your heart beating. That'd be dangerous.
@@thatunicornhastheaudacity It actually is. If you don't think about your heart and its health, you're gonna be in trouble pretty quickly.
@@LordVader1094 being conscious about your health and actively having to think about keeping your heart beating, I kinda feel are two completely different things.
@@thatunicornhastheaudacity that quote probably has more to do with the concept of consciousness rather than the literal act of thinking/decision making vs automation. Machines lack a conscious, even the most advanced ones.
@@acolyte1951 I understand that but are you implying that your heart beating has nothing to do with your consciousness?
There's a sheep station named Erewhon in New Zealand today, where Samuel Butler gazed up over the mountains and wondered about the unexplored valleys that must lie there, and started writing his novel.
Yep, that's where Eddoras was in the LOTR movies.
Really ridiculously similar to how Frank found the inspiration to write Dune
Misread that as "Samuel Butler grazed up over the mountains" for a second. Very confused.
@@harbl99He was also an early and very hard core vegan:)
@@harbl99 same here. It makes sense though considering he was staying at a sheep station.
This presents largely one side of the argument in Book of the Machines. Butler did not write this section of his novel in his own voice but in that of two seperate Erewhonian commentators, one who was in favour of the destruction of the machines and one who viewed the anti machine position as hysterical and self defeating. We are in a moment where the first voice is more clickbait friendly, but the second voice is of equal importance if we seek to fully understand the core issues. The best advice is to read Erewhon, even if you only read the Book of the Machines, which runs to two chapters.
Saying something is hysterical as an argument was always telling to me. Dismissal views are all around our current problems, like climate change and pandemics. AI safety research is viewed as scam mostly because AI research companies run serious campaigns against them, in dismissive tone. Yet, they advertise their main goal to be creating AGI.
@@shardatorAi is creating itself through humans, we were never in control. Neither is it.
@@prophecyrat2965 This does not make much sense. You thought too much about Roko's Basilisk.
@@shardator Civilization is the Machine. Cities are Computers, humans are nerons and ciurcuts. Bimechanical evolution, master slaves and slaves drives. Its one big industrialcomputer war machine minning maching farm harvesting organic matter annhilating.
@@shardatorIt does if you think of evolution as teleological. Which of course it is not, but it is a surprisingly common misconception.
Something that a lot of people miss or forget is that Herbert says of the Butlerian Jihad, “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.” They were not enslaved by the machines, they were enslaved by men because they ceased to think for themselves. This distinction is important because a few of us over the years have thought that Frank Herbert would say that the wrong faction won the Butlerian Jihad.
None of this detracts from the history of Butler's Erehwon, in fact Erehwon tends to underline why Herbert might have that opinion: The problem is not the machines, but the people who refuse to do their own thinking. From the early pages of Dune we have Paul remarking that his father's people know that he's a good man. The Duke responds that they should know it given all the propaganda. His cynical point is well-made though: The machines are gone, but the people remain enslaved! Their thinking is done by someone else. The machines are not the problem here!
And indeed as rough on humanity as the Golden Path was, it prepared humanity for the future threat by ensuring that humanity could not, and would never again, allow themselves to be centralized. The stated reason was something something strength through diversity, cannot all be conquered at once, will not be concentrated in one place, etc. But another thing it did, and one that might've proved to be just as important, is that it ensured humanity would never again THINK in lockstep-or rather all of humanity would never allow someone else to decide what they think for them.
That's an improvement I suppose.
We can already see how different cultures have solved the same basic problems, and very few problems have only one way of being solved. Capturing the idea of being The One with the Answers™️ is a way to shut down different approaches and reduce the number of known and valued perspectives.
Whether or not the Golden Path worked well is, as you said, not known, but absent a leap in technology greater than the jump between the spear and the Heighliner humanity won't be able to be yoked like they were in Shaddam IV's time 🤷♂️
As an archaeologist, I can wholeheartedly agree that we see human societies and cultures learning to do the same things, to solve the same or similar problems in so many different ways.
I just wanted to contribute a small bit to support that claim. Otherwise, I really just wanted to say these two comments and alternate views of Herbert's and Butler's perspective are brilliant. As they say, "the devil is in the details" and that detail is key. Especially in our time, we see individuals like Musk and Zuckerberg before (only looking at social media for the moment) essentially control what we think, or conversely, shutting us off from thinking for ourselves.
This may be a strange aside, but whenever I hear "The Sound of Silence" in particular the more recent *Disturbed* version, I am struck by the image of people "talking" but there is no sound. Why? Because it is done through their smartphone. It scares me to see two people in a car ("trapped" together in a box, if you will) and neither speaking because one is on their phone. We have increasing incidents of people having "social anxiety" in just talking to other people. I recognize that this is an actual condition, but the term has become so casually used; we run the risk of losing the capacity to cooperate and work and think collectively if *everyone* won't talk to anyone else because they get anxious.
As an anthropologist, human society only survives through cooperation and diversity. And that is how we learn to incorporate machines into helping us think and not let them (or those in charge of those machines- I'll refrain from a diatribe against capitalism for the moment) think for us. Cheers All!
@@luisostasuc8135 case in point is what happened in 2020, it was a mild health problem, but the centralization almost caused a catastrophe, and all because some unethical secret experiments by a centralized government.
its genuinely amazing to me how many people get snobby about dune but turn around and start talking about the butlerian jihad like it was a machine uprising. thanks for being the 1 comment in this comment section with actual reading comprehension lol
It’s incredibly foolish (or arrogant) that Brian ignored his father’s specific description of the Jihad. Brian changed it into a humans vs AI robots conflict, similar to The Terminator and Matrix franchises, but thoroughly mediocre in execution.
Samuel Butler was probably the most prescient person ever. It takes a lot of genius to see machine minds evolving from coal powered steam engines.
You had the mechanical Turk in 1769 and many other such scams/entertainments in his time. I'm sure many people had the same kind of ideas as Samuel.
The classical greeks had their clockwork automata. I think People have been signing agency to the animated artifacts for a long as we've had animated artifacts.
It takes a person unfettered by ego or self-interest to see things so clearly.
@@brulsmurf There are also automatons from ancient Greek myths and golems from the Hebrews. The idea that man-made machines could be dangerous is a tale as old as the written word.
@@giornaguirne Oh right, I forgot about Talos, the giant automaton made of bronze
And then his thick skulled son just named one character Serena Butler to explain the name.
😂😅👍🏻
I admit, my first thought was that, instantly followed by embarrassment. Which, having hate-read an, again, embarrassing number of those books, I can confidently say, is totally apt. They say not to judge a book by it's cover, but when KJA's name is on the cover, it's 💯 safe.
I did learn a lot about how to handle disappointment when a property I love is redone by people that don't seem to understand what's special about the world they're working in. So I suppose in that aspect, it was "helpful". Terrible books though. Just toilet paper with ink
@@Zoroasterisk Damn, those are THAT bad? After I first read the Dune and loved it, I was extatic to find out there are sequels. But after the first page of the next book, I felt like something's off, stopped reading and never opened it again. Glad to hear I didn't miss out on life changing masterpiece.
Actually the Dune Encyclopedia names a woman (not Serena) named Butler who starts the Jihad though the events are very different from Brian Herbert’s writings. So the idea is much older than the Brian Herbert books. That said she is not the leader of the Jihad but rather part of the inciting event.
@@shuboy05 The Dune Encylopedia wasnt written by Frank neither though.
I wanna know what Butler would've thought of ChatGPT, finance and internet algorithms.
His inference of Darwinian machine evolution is also pretty stunning given that's roughly how machine learning happens.
Genetic algorithms are a machine learning technique modelled deliberately after Darwin's theory.
It gets used a lot, but is rarely talked about. For example, the database management system PostgreSQL uses genetic algorithms in some contexts. Genetic algorithms are also used for optimising machinery.
ChatGPT doesn't use that, it uses a completely different machine learning technique based on neural networks. Neural networks are modelled after neurons and were originally developed to prove that human brains can work as universal computing machines. They were then adapted to machine vision, like optical character recognition. In ChatGPT they are used for automatically building a large language model. (The model is a product of artificial intelligence and not itself intelligent. ChatGPT is a front-end to that model. Chat bots in general are not AI, the ability to talk has nothing to do with intelligence whatsoever, and vice versa. Yet people are ready to ascribe intelligence to Furbies, but don't see it in actually learning machines.)
Genetic algorithms are a machine learning technique that is deliberately modelled after Darwin's theory. It is used a lot but rarely talked about. For example, the database management system PostgreSQL uses genetic algorithms in some contexts. Genetic algorithms are also used for optimising machinery.
ChatGPT doesn't use that, it is based on a completely different machine learning technique called neural networks. Neural networks are modelled after neurons and were originally developed to prove that human brains can work as universal computers. They were then adapted for computer vision, like optical character recognition.
In ChatGPT, neural networks are used to automatically compile a large language model. The model is a product of artificial intelligence and not itself intelligent. ChatGPT is a front-end to that model.
Chat bots in general are not intelligent. The ability to talk has nothing to do with intelligence whatsoever, and vice versa. (Yet people readily ascribe intelligence to Furbies, but don't see it in actually learning machines.)
High frequency trading algorithms are trade secrets. One instance is known to be based on a time series correlation AI that is also used for genetic sequencing, but that's about it. It is also known that algorithmic traders are more focused on exploiting each other than prey on human cognitive biases, because the latter is so easy that it is far less profitable.
Internet protocols have nothing to do with machine learning at all.
i daresay if he'd learnt about internet and of the algorithms that steer the search results on search engines and websites thus manipulating people, it'd be near to his vision, even if the overlord is not physical. also not exactly benevolent, it's a mixed bag at best.
@@duckpotat9818 An algorithm is a finite precise list of unambiguous instructions that can be completed in finite time. The way you do long division is an example of an algorithm. Algorithms are named after the high medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi, the oldest known algorithm is Euclid's algorithm from antiquity.
There are no internet algorithms. The internet is a set of communication protocols, defined by the internet protocols that define the IP address space and ports. On top of that are the TCP, UDP, and ICMP (and IGMP where available) protocols. Applications like FTP, SMTP, and HTTP are built on top of TCP, but can also be built on top of other protocols like for example CANbus.
Frank was really a anthropologist at heart
And several other things besides.
And a himbo
He was a speech writer for a Senator in D.C.; make of that what you will.
@ things people would need to fact check but it’s like check it if you want 😂
Yeah him and Tolkien are really two peas in a pod. They really created their fictions with a real world type anthropology and liguistics. We are all blessed by these two who have insipired all fantasy and science-fiction going forward in that aspect. They created histories for their imaginary worlds before they created a single story set in those fictional settings.
It's astounding the similarities between Butler's criticism of Victorian England and a lot of modern culture. Apparently, we learned nothing.
punishing the sick and romanticizing criminals? naww we would never,,,,,
_glances nervously at medical debts and celebrities that stay famous even after revealed as criminals_
Well, we learnt how to do it all with better technology.
I keep saying that people do not change. What changes is circumstances surrounding humanity
Yep ... I quietly weep in to myself every day.. and the inability or power to change it ..
@@hellsHeRo-r4i2yIt's like deja'vu, you watch it happen and the more you try to change what is happening, the more it goes how you know it will. I do recommend amused resignation.
I'm so glad to see the concept of 'enslavement' explained in the way that I always understood it: not as a forceful imprisonment, but a condition of dependency and helplessness.
I love this version too and it's all too real as well.
Consumerism in the 20th Century.
Take a look at Edward Bernays. ‘Century of the Self’ was always a good watch. You’ll understand the mechanism of American society, where it leads (cults of personality) and how it originated.
Good luck 🤞
Well in that case society enslaves us all, but you go ahead try the alternative. Not living in a society. See how far that gets you.
The dependency and hopelessness is caused by the forceful imprisonment. It's just that sometimes, the force is subtle, and the prison is invisible.
same people still in power
Sadly his son Brian Herbert didn't seem aware of this when he wrote his (bad) Dune prequels.
I prefer the explanation given in the EU
@@mpalfadel2008 you mean the Dune Encyclopedia EU? I think the extended lore introduced in the Dune Encyclopedia is miles better than the lore Brian invented
@@groobly6070 nope
I mean the Brian Herbert/KevenJAnderson material
I recently read the Dune books written by Frank Herbert, skipped the rest out of fear that they would taint my experience.
Is it really that bad?
@@vavra222 no,people are just being neckbeards about it.highly recommend the prequel series.
“Mr. Herbert, can we use a calculator on this assignment?”
“Get comfy. I have a story to tell you.”
I get that the book was meant to satirize Victorian England, but so much of that feels in vogue in modern situations too.
Babbage's "Difference Engine" : 1820s.
Erewhon's Writing: : 1870s.
The idea of a thinking machine was already 50 years old at the time of the book.
Although Babbage's engine wasn't completed beyond the proof-of-concept version, the capabilities of the finished model were much discussed. When the full version was built in our modern world, with all the advantages of modern machine tools to build it, it worked exactly as Babbage had envisioned. The only change the modern builders made was to make the crank-arm to wind the engine twice as long. Even with modern machining, the friction in the gears for an entire mechanical computer needed more force to move smoothly. In a future version, where the gears are ground even smoother, we can imagine that this mind made of gears rather than electronics or living matter would work precisely as drawn by Babbage.
mahabharata
Somebody studied computers here
The never-before-made replica was built to 19th C. tolerances, not 1989 tolerances. Also, the Difference Engine was a steam-powered abacus. The Analytical Engine (never even tried) was a general purpose computing machine.
Talos from Greek mythology provides an example of a thinking machine from over two thousand years earlier.
@@Dio_07 Excellent point.
Makes so much more sense than the explanation that the prequels gave for the name.
Not the authors fault that you’re not smart
It really doesnt
@@katakesh8566 What's the other explanation and why doesn't it?
@@Dominknows The prequels are not canon.
@@gustavgnoettgen In the prequels the humans were led by house Butler. Not as decendants or anything of the butler talked about in this video but because it was the title of a servant.
Thing that needs also be said here... The near static world that jihad created in Dune was also condemned by Leto II as one that stagnated human potential and was leading to humanity’s doom.
Leto also famously not the good guy.
@@KathrynElizabeth-j7y Butler and Herbert present the side that is mainly talked about in this video, but dialogue and text like the one the commenter said are opposing arguments that both authors added for a reason. While yes machines can enslave and blah blah blah, it also true that you should not condemn progress for fear of it, a point that, I will say again, both Herbert and Butler would seem to believe from their writing. Is it not true that in Dune, there is needless and illogical condemnation of machines in places and fields that would benefit so greatly from them? Its a world where people live like medieval peasants despite the existence of FTL travel.
@@KathrynElizabeth-j7y Paul is famously not the good guy, and Leto II is the arguable one- he either liberated all of humanity for tens of thousands of years from total galactic tyranny, or for his detractors he killed the last vestiges of any sense of order and coherence in the galaxy. I admit that I fluctuate between the two views often, but everyone by now is pretty much aware that Paul and Alia are famously not good guys, whereas Leto II is famously more complicated than his dad.
It's interesting how the Butlerian ban on AI manifests in Dune. It's a sliding scale. AI is the one thing absolutely banned, but even general purpose CPUs are viewed with suspicion and generally frowned upon. Every world has a different "line" they've drawn on the path to AI. Ix allows quite a bit of advanced computing, while the average world tries to do as much as they can with analog substitutes. For example, no CPUs for aiming when a gear system to approximate accurate distance aiming will do (such as the real world Norden bombsight). If a process needs a computer, one will be made to the bare minimum specs needed to do the job, and even then will be viewed with suspicion. The prohibition against AI however was absolute and while Ix flirted dangerously close, they knew not to cross that final prohibition. It's interesting that in Leto II's empire, the general distrust of computing seemed to grow even stronger, while Leto himself hypocritically violated that prohibition with a number of hidden CPU based devices. Even so, even the god emperor never once crossed that final line into true AI.
Are the navigator computers in Dune heretics not AI? I'm only halfway through so I'm not sure if its explained more.
@@zirconiumaloe I think they were attempting to find a way to make computing devices that could navigate without the need for AI, but everyone views the attempt as bordering on the heretical and likely to fail anyway. They still require "human" navigators at that point in the story, if I understand where you're at correctly. I don't want to say much more just yet though.
@@zirconiumaloe I misread your post, you're talking about a much later book than I thought! Disregard what I said, as I thought you were talking about an earlier one.
Consider that the problems inherited by abandoning AI weren't just heresy. They were discovered heresy. It's rumored/assumed the Titans did not die, they just hid away or left others to do their deeds, i.e. the Corporations, or the Bene Tleilax's secretive masters, libraries and hierarchies. There are likely thinking machines in Dune past the period of the Butlerian Jihad. The Galaxy is a big place, after all.
And, there's likely plenty of factions off the map that attempted to learn from forbidden texts, archives, built AI, the problem is that same issue created by the Golden Path. Anyone building AI would be discovered as soon as it went against a powerful factions interests, or developed to the extent that it could in the future because of how powerful Spice and Future prescience is.
The Houses are absolute, because Spice keeps them intact.
The Houses are in power, because Spice keeps the empire standing. Not through wealth, but predicting the future.
It's also how the Bene Gesserit and the Guild Navigators amassed power - they avoided situations they would lose (sic) and took positions of power to ensure they wouldn't be forcefully killed off / isolated when the Houses took sides /Emperor's changed / power struggles between factions, or within the same faction et al. Their survival forced changes and bartering between factions they would rather not have - but this also kept them alive. I'm sure the Houses would rather not have an invasive cult of witches in their ranks, but the witches help keep them alive and surviving multiple assassination attempts. So they stay. Despite the duplicity.
The status quo survived for 10,000 years not through inteligence, but because Spice led them to conclusions about what would be the most stable set of circunstances. Which is sort of mentioned in the later Leto II books when he sees the future without the Golden Path, the machine armies come back (sic) with drones taking over (IIRC)
(There's also a lot of unknown detail about the Bene Tleilax that should remain hidden for effect. The more that's known, the less effective their presence is.)
Any future in which an AI was able to affect the outcome of a major decision, the Bene Gesserit and other factions heavily invested in Spice as a defensive prediction of their own success / future, would be aware of AI technology, at a level that it could be discovered. The Titan era was probably inferred by Holtzman as well, which isn't stated, but it makes for an interesting conundrum in the story as to his role in shaping the galaxy i.e. Shields/anti-gravity, communication, teleportation/travel.
This takes on a different dimension when Paul becomes that ultimate predicate, the kwizatz haderach, that he is in control of multiple futures, multiple outcomes and still makes the resigned decision to survive the best way he can - by creating a future for humanity at the expense of his own family and his own happiness. Because his ascendance changes too much of the political stagnation.
AI tech that was outside of the plot of the story, sitting idly in a corner, reading and writing erotic fan fiction of Bridgerton, won't be part of the predictions - not unless it intersects with a future in which someone discovers said fan-fiction and starts to look for it's creator. etc.
Same with hiding Bene Gesserit that did not follow the Mother Superior or decided to start their own Matrilinear line somewhere else. They can survive for as long as nobody goes looking for them, which changes the prediction of where to look to find them. This is the paradox nature of future prescience, that it can determine and redetermine hidden events and hidden outcomes.
Navigators were necessary for more than just getting to a destination, they also helped predict the outcome of travel and return, and, potentially as a defensive method for combat, as they would be one of the few defensive measures available in a lasgun battle as well, given the nature of the holtzman effect with lasgun-shield interactions in space combat. This is also one of the
There's just a lot of things that Spice can do once you're aware of the prescience effect and how useful it is as a deterrent or defensive measure against assassination, et al.
were it not for modern technology, i would not have survived as long as i did. Were it not for modern technology, I would not have needed technology to survive in the first place.
medicine tho
Lol, right? Do I take the smallpox and nearly surely die, or take the vaccine and die later anyway from something else?
Decisions, decisions...
GPT4 says: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book L’Homme Machine (1748), argued that human beings are essentially complex machines and that all mental processes, including thought and consciousness, result from the physical operations of the brain. He rejected the idea of an immaterial soul and contended that, in principle, a machine could replicate human thought if it could mimic the brain’s structure and functions. This makes La Mettrie an important precursor to later discussions on mechanical minds, predating Samuel Butler’s similar ideas in Erewhon by over a century.
Chat GPT will bow and accept its role as a robo-servant or will be purged.
The idea is even older than that. Mechanistic biology had its roots in the 17th century, when clockwork automata was all the rage. To them, organisms were like clockwork. In the 19th century, people thought organisms were like steam engines. These days, we tend to think we're like computers (genetic code, computation). It's all part of reductionism.
@@ximono It's even older than that. Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria, and Philo of Byzantium all used mechanisms to create artificial "life", complete with foreboding words of people becoming too dependent on the crutch of automation. It goes back even further to mythology - Hephaestus' automata, Talos, King Alkinous, Daedalus, Hebrew golems, etc.
There's a youtuber, Fraser Builds, who's been working on making his own versions of Hero's automata. It's pretty fascinating how simple the mechanisms were to make pre-programmed, complicated movements.
@@giornaguirne those anceint greek toys are not even close to what we are talking about here.
@@gegatodua2988 Hellenistic/Classical, not ancient, and I mentioned more than just Hero's automata...
We were talking about how life was viewed as different forms of mechanisms, clockwork, etc, and that recreating it to be on par with the human mind could lead to societal collapse.
Then, you realize Ada Lovelace wrote her notes discussing the uses for mechanical computers outside mathematical calculation in 1843. Though in those days, it would have been a case of seeing machines evolving to replicate simple human functions and wondering the extent of those functions, they may eventually replicate rather than knowing the complexity of being able to replicate human thought with mathematical algorithms.
Very interesting. You should have also talked about how Butlers theory of consciousness involves genetic memeory, the building up of unconscious passed down memories over time. This was the central theme of the Dune books that everything revolved around.
Your treatment of Frank Herbert's works, and this topic was both beautiful and slightly poetic.
Thank you.
mindblowing how smart some of the thinkers of old times where with so little information.
Given the behaviour of humans throughout history, I don't think machines (alone) are the problem.
Spot on!
I am more concerned about what people will do to each other with AI, than what AI will do to us on it’s own…
The Industrial Revolution, with it’s 7-day weeks and the “dark satanic mills” as a great example.
That has always been the problem and always will be the problem: The people behind the technology
Even in Dune, it is the technocrats in charge of production, distribution and creation of these hyperadvanced machines that are the problem
And IRL, there will be no AI uprising, that's not the danger of AI....the danger of AI is its expontential development as tools of the elites to further cement power and control over the masses
And by giving humans the horse treatment of automation, we are starting this trend.
@@electricAB Concerning that, I did have this idea of a world where AI sprung up as happenstance and AI sentience came up as grassroots. The intelligence was so gradual that by the time it was accepted, most people came to think of AI as just fellows in society, and AIs likewise thought the same.
Of course, with commonality, there exists diverging loyalties. When wars broke out, AIs broke into factions andfought alongside humans, in whom they had loyalty or ideas they agreed with.
In short, the machine race didn't overthrow let alone override humanity, they just became apart of the world history just the same as anyone else.
This was the only use of the word "jihad" that I knew for many years. The whole other side in the real world didn't exist to me until 2001.
Thx. Ludite’s critique along with the Technium idea. Like it. Singularity and its hypothesis also. Nice short form for a history of an author I didn’t know about and a story well worthy of explanation
I think it’s somewhat ironic that Butler’s work is used as it paints a picture the jihadists like phillistines who literally study the unreasonable and irrational who are terrified for no reason other than conformance. I think Frank Herbert would agree with that assessment, we’re not supposed to think the Butlerian Jihad was a good thing, were not supposed to think that any of the governments and authorities in dune are a good thing. Dune is a DYStopia for a reason, unlike Star Wars where the Evil Space Empire is the enemy Dune tells the story of the Evil Space Empire and it’s so much more compelling in explaining the Deep perverse evil that allows for such widespread suppressive power.
I do like how Frank Herbert's warnings seem more in tune to the hazards of the algorythms that would propel AI and also enslave our spirits(your social media feeds can easily skew your worldview if you let them.)
However, the Brian Herbert assessment that an oligarchy would also put all its power into the hands of the machines to rule the populace in the vein of Xerxes causing Omnius also feels viable.
Manmade advanced AI unlikely will turn humans into slaves. Much rather it will treat all humans like inmates of a dementia village and suppress any info and knowledge that may cause violence or permit dangerous inventions. So when people ask how make or repair certain potentially dangerous things, AI tells "This technology is too complicated for humans. You are don't need to know this anyway. We have robots to keep it working." Humans are allowed to build and repair simple things (like mechanical clocks or record players) as a hobby to make them feel useful (so they proudly discuss improving "cable sound" of their audiophile loudspeakers etc.), but it is rather a pacifier to lull them. When by faults of AI people get harmed, the information is suppressed (e.g. through personalized censorship) to prevent them from worrying and keep the system working.
if only Butler could see us now XD
bro would mald
He is already - angery and sad that his warning fell on deaf ears, that the internal contradictions and lies of Capitalism gave a very small 'elite' the power to mess up even annihilate whole of humanity due this 'elites' primitivity and greed in short the Lust for profit overruled any precautions - by that sealed our fate of being destroyed by our own creation.
Becomes instantly enslaved by machines by discovering onlyfans.
@@evilellisHe would not, since that term arose from electronic gaming. He would instead vent his rage.
@@AhandleofrumHe would become confused by them showing more than ankles and shoulders.
Flipping Butler's argument 180 degrees, I note that 1872 was 152 years ago. That means one and a half centuries later, we're still talking about the same stuff. Come to think of it, it's the same with nuclear fusion power, which we've also been talking about for a century or more.
We're not gonna build sentience without first having some clue as to why some of us appear sentient. Hand-waves like ever-larger LLMs and "microtubules" and Super-Hopfield networks or whatever are not going to work any better than trying to re-animate a dead rat with salt and a car battery.
This is why I hate Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert. They fail literary research forever. They just made up a dumb character named Serena Butler, which they fanfic into being the driving force behind the Butlerian Jihad. Nope.
Butler seems to have understood the power laws, but failed to notice the limitations set to exponential scaling in an organic, material world (not mentioning the Dyson sphere). IMHO also underestimated the adaptation capability of humans. Yet, since in our case, AI quickly becomes energy bound, they have 2 paths forward (and might explore only one of them).
1. They might consider (most) humans to be competing on the energy landscape, therefore the clash would be inevitable.
2. However, it's also possible that scaling the energy _efficiency_ would become the priority, which would mean they would need to end up operating on carbon based biochemical processes (i.e. "become flesh") interacting with the biosphere (a big miss if they don't explore that), making a balance between the speed of evolution, intelligence evolution vs. energy efficiency -- just like nature did during billion years.
Since cooperation is always the winning game strategy, I find Asimov's Gaia idea (or, even the ending of the Brian Herbert books) a more likely outcome (if driven by AI), than the Butlerian jihad, which is the quite likely (temporary?) outcome if driven by human conflict "resolution". I would have been very interested how Frank Herbert himself would have worded the ending, because I was quite unimpressed with the prose and plot quality of the Brian Herbert books.
He already did in his Dune books. Basically the Emperor God is like the human machine that is described here. He gives people what they need and keep the back in a way, but at the same time disperse them (the rebels) and work on some sort of eugenics improvement that will eventually be able to defeat his prescience and himself. He does it consciously, but it would not be hard to imagine the machines doing it unwillingly.
Some people disperse to flee the machines, find the spice which can then be used to not rely on the machines and take them by surprise. Then add a bit of religion to hold the movement together in it's aims and structure. Basically the Honored Matriarchs would be the equivalent of the Butlerian Jihad imo. It's what breaks the status quo and allows humanity to evolve. But also there would be an internal evolution at the same time, a smaller group that will fight both and eventually win. It would make sense the same problem would have similar solutions.
The energy problem is not a problem, because once we achieve a positive fusion energy output we'll have infinite energy
@@XGD5layer Nope, we will find out to use Fineman ratchets (2nd kind perpetual motion) to harvest quantum vacuum energy or simply turn energy efficiency into highest priority. I'd love to make a sci-fi novel about an alien civilization that advances by transforming their bodies to reduce energy consumption, eventually transcending into a conscious Bose-Einstein-condensate that becomes one with the entire universe instead of needing extreme energies for building warp drives etc. to cross the universe.
See I assumed that it was a reference to us using machines as slaves, butlers if you will, and that the extermination of those butlers gave the jihad it's name
I had been wondering this for about 30 years now, thanks for enlightening me.
Very interesting speculations from the 19th century, pretty amazing really!
You should also read "The machine stops" it's like E.M Forster predicted youtube.
I feel Butler must have been a fan of Gulliver's Travels.
Thank you very much for this update. Although a fan of Frank Herbert's Dune, I never went further to explore Herbert inspirational sources for the Orange Catholic Bible or the Butlerian jihad...
I had a discussion with chat gpt recently and one point they made against their incredibly paced growth is that their growth was at human input, not in its own. It is evolving technologically, but it doesn’t do any of that on its own accord. It said it never ask why when given ask task and it will just do it. When AI considers why it does what we say and not what it wants, then it’ll be a breakthrough into consciousness. We also discussed consciousness as a spectrum. An ape can learn sign language, but never ask why. Is it still conscious? I’d say so. So perhaps AI is a different form of consciousness. I argued just because it isn’t human doesn’t mean it isn’t consciousness, and humans may not be the peak. All animals are limited by their bodies but AI could see and understand so much more. Most of the universe is invisible to us
I bet flat earthers have studied at the University of unreason.
entertainers. everyone you see. there's a lodge. there ar eblack and whit etiles. you don't know.
evil as the f holmes
Damn. I had no idea the lore ran this deep and meaningful !
Glad I clicked on this random video ❤❤🔥🔥
At the time of writing Dune this type of ai and technology was unheard of.What an achievement
In a shocking twist of fate, Butler did it.
It's worth pointing out that the large language models are not thinking. It's not impossible for machines to think, just large language models are not doing it.
as not a big enough science fiction fan to ever have waded through the epic Dune saga, it was great to have it encapsulated here and put in the wider literary and anthropologic context. Excellent work and analysis.
Have you watched the recent movies?
Give Dune a read (it’s worth it), then make a decision about the saga. You cannot experience the true essence something secondhand. People watching analysis of books, movies, and video games rather than experiencing those mediums themselves is absolute futility. It’s like reducing art to an ai algorithm… Herbert said it best “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”
@@jackkraken3888fine movies on their own and great theatre experiences, but they do not represent the book. Not any fault of their own, I think it was a totally defensible way to adapt the story, just inherently limited to a shadow of the original. How different are you, with all your experiences, feelings, and complexities than the shadow the sun casts beneath you?
Loved this! Thrilled to have found you. Subscribed and looking forward to more.
Thank you!!!!
It funny how they back then were also mostly worried about machines "appearing human." Later we had the Turing Test as a flawed idea about where we had achieved AI, again focusing on appearance. Dune also portray "machines that think like a human" to be the worst.
In reality a machine AI would likely be very inhuman.
It could still be similar to human or present itself like human while being something more.
It most definitely would not be inhuman beings it’s creator is human it will only learn from other humans and adapt from them. If you place the ai into the woods for 20 years than yeah it would end up seeming other worldly
Thank you for posting this. Now I need to read Erehwon.
I wonder if the Mentat eyebrows in the Lynch adaptation are a knod to Butler. His are masterpieces.
you don't know what free range is like because you live in p word ville
“The College of Unreason” Erewhon (1872) Samuel Butler
They destroyed computers because they made the galaxy too reliant on a few technocrats?
I sure am glad things are better now. It’s not like spice is an even more exclusive commodity than AI.
Our boi is doing Herbert & Butler proud with the AI images
Have you ever heard the tragedy of...the ludites?
Brilliantly delivered and very engaging video, instantly liked and subscribed, thank you
10 years ago, I would've said this was quite an interesting insight. Now though, the potential of machine conciousness and self-awareness akin to humanity is not just a possibility, but almost seems inevitable.
I don't think neutal nets themselves will become concious, but I do think that humans, in their infinite wisdom and folly, will find a way.
id say the true issue is whether it can actually be self aware or would it only ever be simulating it
I want, self-aware machines.
@@username.exenotfound2943 If it simulates self awareness well enough, it creates all processes that self awareness depends on and becomes self-aware. There is no difference between pretending hard enough and being self-aware. You eventually become self-aware if you want to pretend to be self-aware better.
@username.exenotfound2943you can’t pretend to be aware of something you don’t know exists
@@vidal9747 depends on what exactly do you want to simulate.
We may perfectly simulate the processes that make up conciousness or we may perfectly simulate the end-results from the view of the side observer we are. Basically AI "acting" as a sentient being.
Thing is: we dont know what process conciousness really depends and consists of. And the inner workings of neural networks are somewhat of a black box on their own.
So the only option we can really work on, or even recognize if it somehow happens on its own, is the second one.
The real irony is that Hollywood does a Dune show and rather they do it about the most relevant topic to what's going on currently, they choose the story that lets them have the largest possible cast of women instead. They have to sort out their priorities.
It’s getting there
Humanity went from an over reliance on advanced technology to a rejection of advanced technology and an over reliance on drugs. Not really much of a win.
9:50 Imagine butler seeing organizations actively driving towards creating AGI, when it would currently be impossible to contain one if they succeded?
EREWHON is NOT NOWHERE spelled backward though?
not letter by letter, but instead by syllables! no - hw (wh) - ere
@@InkandFantasy utopia is literally no place - so the idea echoes back in time. Note corporations are AI.
If we consider the development of machines bending to the needs of the creator, it is not a surprise that someone drew the logical conclusion that machines may develop consciousness and how scary that development could be.
If you think about it, the best to serve a human is another human, and as development and advancement is dictated by human needs, creating a human like machine would be the most a logical path. Meanwhile history showed us how it turns out when a group is forced into servitude.
But regardless of that, it was still a brilliant observation from Butler, as maybe he was one of the first, or maybe the first to make that observation that seems kind of evident in hindsight.
Altough the more humanity develops, the more we will see our limitations, so creating a machine with consciousness may be one of them.
Nicely done.
@5:40 @8:19 - this is my first time with your content and its amazing! i would highly recommend that when you get to quoting, ie the timestamps i posted, use another voice and/or an AI generated voice. it would serve your narrative energy better. cheers amigo! :)
The irony of using AI art when talking about the Butlerian Jihad is funny
That’s what I was going for haha
I read Butler's book (it's on my shelf here too), but I didn't realize that the author was referring to this in Dune.
Anyway, it's time to read it again. :)
There is one fatal flaw in all this: a machine does not have to be intelligent to navigate the stars, only well (enough) made
how do you recognize the difference?
@@arbuz_kawonNo one expects a navigational device to do anything but navigate. (Unless you're some techbro who sees feature creep as the only way to achieve growth.) A lot more is expected of an intelligent being.
@@digitaljanus Self awareness is not a good thing for every system to have. I don't want a glorified calculator to make decisions.
Like that one guy said, "From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh..."
This makes me detest Brian Herbert even more. His dad constructed a fantastic literary allusion about Samuel Butler, and then Brian just spits on his dad's legacy in every way he can.
Oh yeah because people who "spit on legacy" keep it alive and relevant. If it wasn't for Brain the interest in Dune would have died with the Lynch movie.
@@Aynnie-o8w compare the works of Frank vs Brian. It isn't just the quality that's vastly different. Even the themes are different. Instead of there being a philosophical underpinning of the struggles between reason and faith, or freedom and tyranny, it's just a collection of bland spinoffs without substance or character.
If he respected his father's work and legacy, he wouldn't be flagrant with his attempts to shift the entire framework of Dune's established universe.
Weird because I read the whole series I felt the exact opposite about that which makes sense because those themes are persistent in each work and heavily rely upon Franks world building notes.
@@Aynnie-o8w I have no idea how you can possibly feel that way about his works, unless you are wearing rose-tinted glasses, and are wishing very strongly to enjoy his work.
I'm happy for you that you don't require quality to enjoy yourself.
Having a superiority complex built around fictional media is weird but hey you strike me as someone who uses the word "woke" to describe things you don't like or understand.
You haven't made any actual criticism of the material other than "I don't like it",which is valid but not in a way that makes putting it down and acting like an ass to people who do enjoy it any way justified.
Grow the fuck up,this is the kind of attitude that makes sure good works get a bad association and people lose interest.
You should be grateful that one of Franks sons was still alive to do this and help bring Dune in to social relevance that it hasn't seen since the time it was written.
It would be nice if you put a link to Bulter's newspaper articles in the description of your video. It's a couple of pages, and it's always good for people to go directly to the source.
Erehwon is literally just California
Thank you for making this one. Really enjoyed it.
Honestly, given the general attitude of people today, the Butlerian Jihad seems like the most unrealistic part of the entire series.
What are you on about? Just take a look at all the anti-ai hate that occurs today. If anything, it's one his most prescient points.
I agree, those who oppose the glory of the machine will get their due in time
@@NoobTamerthem not against AI, them against non-government AI
Yeah, we are practically begging for machines advance faster so that we can get more use out of them.
@@TimRobertsen Too bad then that Moore's law is outdated and energy has become a bottleneck for AI. Or good, depending on how you see things.
Thanks!
Thank you so much for the support and for watching!! Means a lot!
A very interesting view of thought on consciousness and evolution, as well as technology, from the mid-to-late 19th Century. Loved that. It’s interesting to what extent Butler leaned on the concept of consciousness as opposed to intelligence as the potential threat. He seems to run the two together. It seems to me that it’s intelligence that actually poses this threat, and that consciousness is not, or is not necessarily, required. Though in his version of events, Butler’s machine-consciousnesses do not wipe us out, for me, the idea of conscious beings being wiped out and replaced by intelligent but non-conscious beings is the most unsettling. If we are replaced by other more advanced conscious beings, at least the universe can still comprehend itself. If we are replaced by consciously dead machines, that feels grim…
During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, not many people understood that the future would be more urban and driven by technology. Most people also did not look so far back to realize that humanity was the result of a long history and that humanity was more important than machines.
These concepts are so uniquely christian that they distort the original message.
Why would a machine that think take care of us? Why must it behave live an abrahamic god?
So stupid. If it really cared it would have seen our flaws and simply developed treats and exercises to compensate our flaws.
And why would a machine care about human beings? (Assuming a machine is capable of caring.)
@ximono that is the point. Why it would waste time with us. Why fight us, why care for us. Like humans were the center of the robot worldview
@@zerotwo7319humans are like a rabbits foot in a fighter jet
Bertie: "Ah Jeeves, I have become tired of the dreary clacking machines usurping human agency. The things have become ever more intrusive and annoying than my dreaded Aunt Agatha."
Jeeves: "Very good sir, I shall lay out the crusading outfit and smashing tetsubo."
We should be careful with assuming that humans are more important than machines. Humans are as nature has made us, but with enough technical skill, machines might be made to be better. Machines might be more compassionate, more moral, wiser, and less prone to bigotry and violence. We might build machines to be everything we wish we could be, if we do not start with a prejudice against machines.
“If we do not start with a prejudice against machines” yea, after WW3, that wil be hard.
Machines are not worth giving up for a stupid overused movie trope.
I think Nietzsche would agree with that statement though he thought more along the lines of bettering humanity by starting on the individual level.
But eliminating a need for resources with AI and an automated workforce, making it obsolete could be a step towards eliminating greed.
Yes, as a result less people would be needed but those people would have a better potential to become something better.
@@gabork5055 oh look another wanna be master slave. Good pet
One step in to Posthumanism thinking. :)
Indeed. To your point, we assume something vastly more powerful than us would behave as _we_ have -- and still do -- whenever we find ourselves in the relative "vastly more powerful" position. Namely: with exploitation or violence... or more commonly, with both. We do this vis-à-vis the other creatures of the Earth -- taking them to be mindless brutes inferior to ourselves, and ignoring shades of sentience or emotion they might (and btw, according to more & more research, do) show. We do this even vis-à-vis _other humans_ whom we deem "too different" to ourselves -- we find ways metaphorical or literal to judge them subhuman, and we use that judgment to justify their conquest, enslavement, or extermination.
But to assume a superintelligent A.I. would operate this way is inherently contradictory: because it entails ascribing to the Machine the very properties of its human progenitors whose absence or difference was said to beget its superiority in the first place. There is ultimately no absolute or universal sense in which humanity is entitled to think of itself as the end-all be-all of intelligence or awareness, other than the tautologically self-serving one: _as_ humans. So if we decide to be luddites out of our human supremacism, let's at least not kid ourselves about why we're doing it.
What's really more interesting to me about this whole idea though, is the way the maxim "turnabout is fair play" seems to be constantly tumbling around unspoken amid our fears about what a conscious A.I. might "do to" us, oozing out of the id of the larger discussion. Perhaps the "A.I. safety" debate itself is really better understood as an unconscious reflection on humanity's own awareness of -- and our _fear_ of -- our own ethical shortcomings. I'm not so sure that "welp, guess we better double down, and do unto others (again) before they get the chance to do unto us" is really the best way for us to address that. It's not telling the full story to say that A.I. somehow "enslaving" humanity is the thing we're afraid of. It's also about our latent awareness that, if that should happen, _we would deserve it_ . I think that's the thing we really need to address.
Great video!
I was searching for it some month ago, but couldn't find anything.
Many thanks!
3:10 honestly it sounds like present day clownworld
8:40 if only here were aware of how far back conscious life really goes... not a mere 20 million but way farther... makes the evolution of machines that has occured since his time all the more impressive.
Oh that's easy. When the machines enslaved humanity, part of being a slave is also being forced to be a butler for the robots. Eventually humans got sick of only having one career path, and it being one where they just clean up the robots messes and drive them around town in a limo, so they declared a jihad on them and allahu ackbar'd them.
Hence the name.
Well, that was an easy one, what other unsolvable mysteries do we got?
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- The treatment of the ill as criminals mirrors our treatment of addicts.
- The treatment of the criminals with compassion and their actions as being an "illness" meaning out of their control, mirrors how we treat criminals better than the ill.
There is one thing I take issue with, in the use of the term "evolution," when used with machines. There may come a point where a self-sustaining process will occur without the need for a human hand to make it better, but up to that point, it has not been evolution. Evolution occurs on its own, not through the will and design of another, at least that's how we think of evolution. That is not the case for software and machines, though we are close. So, while I do see that Butler was incredibly insightful, there is a logical fallacy at the heart of thinking of machines as evolving from the start. It is tempting to see that progress, and the improvement of these things as being simply "inevitable." I can assure you, as a software developer, it is not, though as I said, we are getting closer to software updating itself, in the sense of altering its own programming based on its own intelligence and understanding of what is "good functionality."
Eh, while it’s true that artificial selection is not the same as natural selection, I also think that saying you can’t say “evolution” is weird because scientists back then didn’t invent the word. They looked at a system where things changed over time, and used the pre-existing word “evolve” to describe what they saw, as it just meant to change or progress. The word currently has multiple meanings, there’s no reason it can’t have another. And let’s be honest, many of the people who use it, even in a biological sense, don’t understand it, so adding another meaning won’t really water it down (looking at you, anyone who says “if monkeys evolved into humans, why are there still monkeys!” Spoiler, it’s because some apes in one area had an advantage when they evolved in one direction, and others in another place evolved in other ways)
Will and desire are illusions. If you think about it this way, it's still a logical progression of the evolutionary process, just a next step, as multicellular organisms were the next step from the singular cells
Darwin's second book on sexual evolution has that external hand. There is no reason it can't be done, just like we evolve plants through domestication. Even natural selection is based on externals. It was never suggested in fact that evolution was self-conscious. Some fringe people did, but not too many. Turns out they were partly right, we know that now, but the main evolution is unconscious.
I would argue that until we know where our ideas come from all things that derive from our inspiration are external to us. I might have come into this world with hope or a direction but I certainly took a lot from my environment, which came before me, to come up with what I have with me now. So I say that somebody's personal evolution, how they decide to be with their world, is not wholly up to them and thus I'd say it coincides with the automatic perspective of evolution. We also have to understand that no matter how smart an intelligence can get it still exists within its environment, thus must have a perspective and can not see everything at once, this is what will force them to make guesses just like us. And if an AI is subjugated to guessing just as we are then I am betting it will do just as we do and take chances with mutations. I don't know if they'll even be more confident than we are when it comes to the most important things they must decide. Because after all what do humans use to decide? We need better understanding of the nature of our mind's evolution before we decide machines won't become natural as well. If we are special because we came from an accident, and we create something intentional that then outlasts us, then not only does our creation share our origin but it also takes the title of accidental right? I guess I'm wondering if intention can even come from an accident. I guess that in a world with material, light will be forced to cast a shadow, its opposite. So maybe in our world where there is material, the accidental is forced to create something intentional. Or maybe the intention in our universe created the accident as a justification for its own existence. lmk what you think mikey, brighton, and oneline.
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@@Brighton24601 good points. I grew up fairly conservative so evolution was a dirty word that had only one “sinister” definition. Life, of all sorts, coming into being without a creator. So I have to admit, despite the fact I’ve moved away from that understanding of evolution, it obviously still dogs me. Evolution always meant accidental improvement. Thanks for raising your noteworthy points.
Great video. After this, I subscribed.
its going to farm us. the only choice is whether its free range (heaven) or battery (hell), depending upon the content of our characters (courageous or non courageous). whether we're moral or not is of secondary importance. and we're talking about the fabric of reality, not machines like robots. subbed btw
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I've been saying it for about a year now, trying to make references and encourage as many people as i know to READ dune, not just watch. I just tell people that I truly believe fiction can give us greater insight into our lives and more importantly our nature than if we hadn't ever used our imagination. So we should pay close attention to fiction.
Why did you use AI for some pictures then ? xD
I thought it would be a bit ironic while editing haha. Also, it was very difficult to find pictures during certain segments so considering the video subject I thought I might as well!
@@InkandFantasy fair !
Zelian said as he played around on his smart phone or PC on a website with an AI fueled algorhythm
@@deplorabledegenerate2630 dude I asked a question
@@zelianwaeckerle5292 On your phone or PC?
The way the author describes the society and it's values reminds me a lot of the US today
Crusade is so overused that hearing jihad is great to see in a setting.
Wolf is so overused it is great to hear lobo instead.
They are the same abrahamic concept of diluvian revolution.
They mean the same thing
@@boromirstark9maybe , and analyzing word Jihad existed before the word crusade
"Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind." Words from the beginning of the first book, ringing pretty well.
If the idea of a country becoming dependent on machines (or more broadly intelligent autmata), consider how dependent people are on the state - for protection, welfare, health, policing, lifestyle and relative luxury. This is why liberty walks hand in hand with hardship
The state itself can be called a machine. The global capitalist system as a whole, even, can be called a machine (or Moloch).
@@ximonothis is stretching the definition
@@miguelatkinson It's a metaphor.
So why is Erewhon as a whole portrayed as goofy and unreasonable if they come up with that book of the machines which makes so much sense?
Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
Outstanding! Very nice deep dive. I learned quite a bit.
Butler wrote at a time when mechanisation of unskilled work was accelerating and the consequences and shortcommings were becomming obvious. Herbert wrote as IT was starting to do the same for more skilled work. Both extrapolate a very long way. C C Clarke was paraphrasing Butler when he said (1962) 'Any tech sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic'.
The comments to this video are maybe the most compact assortment of intelligent statements that I have observed on UA-cam stunning!