In the Likeness of the Human Mind AI Liability and the Speculative Fiction of Dune
The author generated this image using Stable Diffusion, an AI art generator. At the time of writing this piece, this art cannot be copyrighted and is not owned by anyone. A note on the use of the word Jihad: Frank Herbert’s Dune novels use the word Jihad to mean a holy war. This is an erroneous translation that diminishes the breadth of situations the word applies to. For accuracy, this article also uses the word Jihad in the places where Herbert used the word, with the understanding that the word has been removed from its original religious meaning. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, it is a vital fact that computers, as we understand them, do not exist. Instead, humans called Mentats are trained to do the work of calculators themselves. This distrust of machine intelligence stems from an event known as the Butlarian Jihad, an apparent revolt in the distant past in which machines were destroyed altogether. The distrust of artificial intelligence and the veneration of the human mind have become first principles in the far future setting of Dune. While the specifics of the Jihad are kept extremely vague in the six books Herbert wrote himself, a couple [read more]