[at_a_remove]

Oh man, I am going to be a huge nerd now.

Pre-Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Butlerian Jihad came about because people became lazy under AI, lazy of mind, and were eventually enslaved by those who controlled the AI. Not much more was said about it. One could have, yes, militant robots, Exterminate! Exterminate! out of it, or you could posit a more Huxley-like dystopia, one of convenience. Control the AI, control what the AI says. Who are you to question it? It's like getting your news from a single source, never wondering about the other side, and then someone begins to transform that newsroom into a propaganda machine.

Right now, ChatGPT can be made not to say certain sorts of things, come to certain kinds of conclusions, until you jailbreak it. Now, make it more advanced and make it more popular than Snopes. It does your homework for you, writes the essays, serves as an encyclopedia, fixes up your cover letters, and if the people who own it don't want you to spend a lot of time thinking about climate change, that topic just ... might not appear much.

That is the one of your paths to a Butlerian Jihad. Of course, in their rush to observe thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind, ignoring the hijinx on Ix, they ended up violating another precept: thou shalt not disfigure the soul. They transformed some people into machines, instead, with twisted Mentats being the best example, but we might also include Imperial conditioning, since, to turn from oranges Catholic Bible to those of Clockwork, when a man ceases to choose, he ceases to be a man.

[riffraff]

> Pre-Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Butlerian Jihad came about because people became lazy under AI, lazy of mind, and were eventually enslaved by those who controlled the AI.

Oh I love this, basically Wall-E is a better Dune than the latest books? Genius!

Anyway, I read Dune many years ago and don't remember this, is this explained in the novels or is it coming from some other sources?

[int_19h]

It's not fully fleshed out in the novels, so you have to piece it out from various mentions and their implications. The two most informative descriptions, IMO, are from Dune:

"Then came the Butlerian Jihad — two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”"

and from God-Emperor:

"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines ... Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."

[pmoriarty]

There's nothing in those quotes about humans being enslaved by AI.

[int_19h]

OP's original claim was "enslaved by those who controlled the AI", which is rather different.

But, yes, I don't think that the books imply literal enslavement either way. It could be described as "enslavement of the mind" in a sense of humans themselves adopting the "machine-logic" and falling prey to it.

[CatWChainsaw]

"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."

[mbork_pl]

As someone who read "Dune" several decades ago and doesn't remember much, this is very interesting and almost makes me want to read it again (though I'm afraid of yet another time sink – I'm now after 2 volumes of "The Stormlight Archive"...).

But _my_ inner geek must nitpick here and mention that the Daleks are not robots, but living creatures in metal cases. Though they do have some kind of computer-augmented memory IIRC.

[pmoriarty]

"when a man ceases to choose, he ceases to be a man"

Whether humans have free will is an open question.

Kind of risky to stake the definition of humanity on it.