What happened to the thinking machines in the world of Dune?

This post contains Spoilers For the Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert.

The rise and fall of Paul Atreides may be the beating heart of the Dune saga, but Frank Herbert’s rich, vibrant worldbuilding outshines its heroes. Change is constant in the world of Dune, where events extend to distant planets and galaxies; Where emperors, messiahs, tyrants and mysterious forces take turns to shape an uncertain future. About 10,000 years before the events of “Dune,” a war was waged against the technocratic class and their “thinking machines,” which destroyed (and erased) their entire legacy and rebuilt society from the ground up. This extermination campaign that led to computers and artificial intelligence being banned in the known universe forever became known as The Butlerian Jihad, or Great Revolt, glimpsed in HBO’s “Dune: Prophecy.”

It is important to distinguish the forbidden machines in the movie “Dune” from our general understanding of the term. The term “thinking machine” has been used to describe any form of artificial intelligence that is conscious and autonomous, whether in the form of supercomputers or sentient robots. The emergence of these thinking machines was inevitable The level of technological advancement that has flourished across the known universeBut machine intelligence soon took oppressive forms that harmed humanity itself. Humanity’s response to this widespread technocracy was religious fanaticism (hence the term “jihad”), where spiritual faith was considered antithetical to the cold logic of the machine. While Frank Herbert’s original series of novels only referenced the Butlerian Jihad in passing, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson explored it more deeply in Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, which is part of the expanded universe of the series.

Let’s look first at Frank Herbert’s exploration of the Great Revolution and then move on to what the Expanded Universe has to say about this historical event set in the Dune universe.

“Once upon a time, men turned their minds to machines in the hope that this would free them. But that only allowed other men who owned the machines to enslave them.”

This quote from the movie “Dune” sums up the catalyst for the Great Revolution, which insisted that humanity establish its own guidelines for reshaping the world (something machines were believed incapable of doing, despite their consciousness). What started as justified indignation quickly turned into religion-fueled hysteria, which encouraged indiscriminate hatred towards anything inherently robotic. With the complete uprooting of technology, human civilization underwent a reversal, creating a huge void that had to be filled by something completely dependent on human intelligence.

By 108 BC (before the guild), a mentat order was created to deal with this void. “Mentat” was a system specifically developed to replace machine intelligence, and humans who demonstrated the cognitive ability to think at the same level as computers were given this title. For example, Dhafir Hawat, who loyally served the Atreides centuries laterproved indispensable to his mental abilities, which were equivalent to those of a supercomputer. Along with the mentats, the Bene Gesserit and the Divergent Navigators Guild were created to prevent civilization from regressing to a primitive state. But were these organizations enough to fill the gaps left by machines?

This question was partly answered by the emergence of a new political order The Padishah Emperor of House Corrino acts as executor For a feudal galactic system supported by the Great House and key organizations (including the Bene Gesserit). This system lasted thousands of years until Paul Atreides crowned himself emperor in 10196 and launched another violent holy war.

The Dune Expanded Universe, along with portions of the Dune Encyclopedia (which includes an introduction by Frank Herbert himself), traces the origin of the word “butler” to the innocent Mannion Butler, whose death was the catalyst for the Great Revolt. In short, an autonomous robot named Erasmus killed a newborn Manion to attract the attention of his mother, Serena, and threw the baby from the top of a tower. Serena, in her rage-fueled desperation, destroyed a thinking robot guard in retaliation, and the cruelty of this child’s murder sparked an uprising that eventually led to the Holy War against the Machines. Soon after, Manion was hailed as a spiritual martyr, and a religious cult was born around Serena, fueling a new obsession with faith and religion.

Serena’s anger became the face of the revolution, gaining the support of humans who had been subservient to robots like Erasmus up to this point. In response, the Thinking Machines, commanded by Omnius Prime – the title held by the most influential AI entities among the Omnius – unleashed a plague that wiped out billions of people. These events occurred on rapidly degrading landWhich was on the verge of becoming habitable as the war continued. Once Earth had become fully irradiated due to atomic warfare and natural disasters, the Battle of Corrin (fought on the planet Corrin) emerged as a turning point that helped erase the Thinking Machines once and for all.

Although Frank Herbert uses brief references to the Great Revolution to emphasize themes of cyclical oppression, the expanded universe helps fill in the gaps to draw deeper parallels between the Machine War and the holy war waged by Paul centuries later. While few adaptations of “Dune” directly address the Machine Wars, it is a series of stories worth revisiting over and over again.