Endless Thread - Butlerian Jihad

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

It's 2025. HBO's "Dune: Prophecy" is one of the most popular shows streaming, and the federal government just announced massive spending on artificial intelligence. The inspiration for "Dune: Prophecy" is in part a prophecy, of sorts, from 1872: One about humans becoming subservient to "thinking machines." What can a 150-year-old text teach us about the current AI revolution? Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. 

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. This show tells climate stories like a stubborn optimist, because hope, innovation, and nature itself are key. to solving the challenges ahead. Follow on your favorite podcast app. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, what level of Dooniverse are you at? Like, do you use the spice must flow in passing conversation? You would know this, yes, because I say it to you every morning, the spice must flow.

Do you call your rabbit Moadib? Only when I'm feeling spicy. Do you in quiet moments scream out? For he is the quiz at Tadirac. Do you do that? You know it's funny about this. I assume you're referring to Dune, the books turned movies. I watched the first Dune movie on an airplane.

The Timitay one? The Timitay one. Oh, man. On an airplane, which you're absolutely not supposed to do because the screen. No. The screen is tiny, the sound is bad. Yes. And so I probably heard like one fifth of the dialogue and would never have known any of the phrases you just uttered.

Fair. So like you're not a Dune person. Short answer, no. Okay. We can continue talking. Okay. We're going to go forward. This will, something will make sense to me.

You must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. More quotes. Don't worry about it. More spicy quotes. More spicy quotes. Okay. Okay.

So I'm going to assume you are not. watching the show, Dune Prophecy on Max right now. Who has the time? No, I'm not. I'm sure it's great, but I'm not. All right. So the show takes place 10,000 years before the events of the movie Dune. That's like their opener.

Okay. I'm going to play you the beginning of this show. It's only about 25 minutes long. Okay? When humans rose up against the thinking machine. that had enslaved them. History says it was an atradis who led them to victory. So this show starts with what you could describe as a science fiction trope.

Can you tell me what that trope is? There's a battle scene. There's big robots. It's dark. There's fire. There's some screaming. What am I missing? You're not far.

But what I'm looking for? is a battle between humans and machines. Okay, yes. Right? Opposite sides. Humans and machines. When war ended and all thinking machine technology was banned. History branded my family as cowards.

So in the Duniverse, this is something called the butlerian jihad. Do you know what that is? No. Okay. Are robots butlers? to humans and then they rise up because they're sick of our

funny business. They're sick of us asking for some tea the robot butiler's. I like that. Sure, yes. But no. So the original Dune books are by Frank Herbert. Later ones get written by his relatives.

He starts in the 1960s, then he writes a couple more in the 1980s. His relatives write some in the 2000s. Okay. One of those books, which comes out in 2002, And this is really the book that underscores this new TV show on HBO. That book is called The Butlerian Jihad, okay? Okay.

Not about robot butlers, turns out. Shucks. So the original Doom books, the Duneverse really kind of focuses on this desert planet, Iraqis, this battle over territory between dueling powers that are outside of the desert planet and the local population. Right? Is that what they were talking about? That's what they're talking about. Good to know.

Just so you know. You can start to see the parallels that people will draw in the real world to the books. Desert, local population versus like these larger powers that are kind of battling over this desert place. This desert place has this like really important resource that allows people to travel. Is this sounding familiar in the real world? Are you picking up what I'm putting down? Yes. Right.

So anyway, people draw these parallels to an general area in the real world. The Middle East. The Middle East. And then in the 1980s, for instance, you have the U.S. and Russia kind of battling over a specific country in the Middle East. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. So, you know, the Doom Books have some of the themes from the real world. woven into them effectively.

And people, you know, recognize that and talk about that in the way that they talk about the books. I'm following. Really, the Bularian jihad in the Duneverse is about this battle between man and machines. It's this conversation about artificial intelligence, really, and how it may impact the world. Now, in the Duneverse, there's this singularity which gets out of control. humans manage to defeat the machines after the machines get too powerful. And unlike the real world so far, humanity basically decides in the Dune books, we've gone too far. We need to ban thinking machines. We need to pull all this stuff back, which is this kind of neat little plot device as to why AI doesn't actually exist in the Dune universe. It's this way of sort of later describing like, this is why AI isn't in these sci-fi books is because there was this like big battle. And we all. We all decided AI was a bad idea and that we should stop. No, thank you.

No, thank you. We'll not be having that. Doon robot butlers, please. Do not bring us any intelligence. What's interesting to me about butlerian jihad in the duniverse is it actually has some inspiration from even way back longer ago, which I think is kind of fascinating. Okay. So I think this inspo from way, way back in the day is a little bit worth exploring. We're going to go from the universe fully into our own universe after the break.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. slash creative studio. Okay, so, but Larry and Jihad does not refer to robot butlers, as we have said. Bummer.

It refers to this guy, Samuel Butler. Samuel Butler, who is really presumably never said anything like, for he is the quizat's hot Iraq. And the reason for that is when he lived. Can you guess when Samuel Butler was alive? With the name like Samuel Butler. It's

got to be like the 1800s. That's good. You got the right century, my friend. Did you want more specific than that? No, that's fine. I'll accept it. Born in 1835, died in 1902. what do you think he might have done for most of his life, a man named Samuel Butler living in the 1800s? I think he was a banker, Ben. Well, you're not right, but that's not a bad guess.

It's not a bad guess. I think he was an aristocrat, Ben. Well, that's not far off. So he... I think, I don't know. What was he? So he was a thinker. And a writer. Okay, sure.

And kind of a famous one at that. So he's probably most famous for this book that he wrote called Arawan. I'm sure you've heard of it. It sounds familiar. It sounds like it's, yeah, it sounds science fiction-y to me, actually. So Aeroon is a satire of Victorian society. That's what the book is. It's kind of taking aims at the ills of the illes of

Victorian society. And in this book, one of the things that is often cited is its picture, the picture it paints of how Victorian society would potentially fall into dystopia, led in part by the industrial revolution and the creation of machine consciousness. So this is kind of like a proto depiction in some ways of AI, which I think is kind of interesting, right? Like this is not, there's no thinking machines in the 1800. Right. And I think it's important to note some basic Butler bio bullet points here. Oh, boy.

Let's get some basic Butler bio bullet points, Ben. Yeah. You're smoking what I'm rolling and I appreciate it. This is a guy that in some ways was part of the British elite class. He goes to the Shrewsbury School at age 12. It's pronounced Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury, yes. He goes to St. John's College at Cambridge.

He studies the classics. He's on a trajectory to go into the Anglican clergy. But as Butler prepares to be ordained, he goes to a kind of slum in London to sort of like study up. And like on young Christians, I guess, young Anglicans. And he decides, you know what, whether or not these kids get baptized makes no difference in their life trajectory. So this is kind of like a revelation for him. And he has that, Butler has this crisis of faith. And he starts to think that Victorian society, this era of British Empire where everything is ordered by class and industrialization is driving all kinds of booms and business and conquest, he starts to think all of this is pretty suss.

And he has the privilege to do this. He's, you know, he also has the privilege to at some point forget the plans to go into the clergy. and run away to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer and a thinker. But there is one thing from the Victorian era that Samuel Butler seems to get behind. And this is the hottest scientific theory of the time, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. And Butler folds that idea and many other thoughts of the time into his writing. Samuel Butler is sort of like imagining the future in his writing. writing, and he lays out in this book, Erwan, this set of ideas. It's really sort of like

three chapters in the book, I think, that really spring forth from an earlier essay that Butler wrote under a nom de plume called Darwin Among the Machines. So Darwin, as we said, sort of comes out right in the 1800s, right? Darwin kind of inspires a lot of thinking at the time. And Darwin's ideas about evolution, some of which we don't necessarily subscribe to these days, but his thinking about evolution is something that is inspiring a lot of thought. And Samuel Butler is one of the thinkers that Darwin's work inspires. He comes up with this article published in a newspaper in 1863 in Christchurch, New Zealand, interestingly, which references Charles Darwin in the title, obviously, and really talks about something he called mechanical life going under evolution.

This idea that, like, machines over time, they get better and better and more powerful and more independent over time. And he imagines this future in which machines might actually supplant humans as the dominant species. So I'm going to ask you to read an excerpt. We refer to the question, what sort of creature man's next species? successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated, but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors. We are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organization. We are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power,

which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages, we shall find ourselves the inferior race. What do you think about that? I think it's true. Not the inferior race, but I think... Inferior races. We don't really want to use that phrase these days. Not a good phrase.

But I think we have made machines very powerful at taking things off of our plates, so to speak. But I say, no, no, no, never inferior because we can do things that machines will never be able to do. Machines just do not have beating hearts, and we do. Yeah. So can a machine be my plumber? I don't think so. A machine can probably be your plumber someday. But can a machine, like, really turn your day around and really listen to you and make you feel heard. That's a good question. Have you seen the movie Her? Oh, God. Deodorant, how long before you're ready to date? What do you mean? I saw on your emails that you've gone through a breakup recently.

I can't believe I'm having this conversation on my computer. There's a couple of things that are interesting to me about this essay by Samuel Butler. Number one, this is written in the 1860s, right? Most of that idea in that little excerpt that you just read, it resonates with me too as like basically correct. Right. Up to a point, maybe. 150 plus years later. And I think that's really.

interesting that we've basically been imagining this future for this long and that someone like Samuel Butler imagined this future, but also that we're incorporating these ideas into science fiction. Science fiction inspires, I don't know, for instance, South African billionaires who want to do stuff and then end up being government advisors. So like someone like Elon Musk basically being like, oh, no, no, no, I don't want us to build AI helpers for people. I want to replace people with a form of AI that is made in the shape of humans, for instance. Or, you know, when Microsoft basically took the name Cortana from a video game, Halo, to make its very real assistant.

Or OpenAI taking the voice from her, basically, Scarlett Johansson's voice and then using it as their voice. And then her getting mad about it. For their technology, yeah. Or for anyone who listened to our madness series, Dr. You and Cameron, the psychiatrist that was experimenting on the human mind, was inspired by Brave New World. Yeah, which is a book that does not have a good ending, by the way. Spoilerly.

Yeah. I think there's nothing wrong with imagining the future, but we have to be thoughtful about how we take the things that we've imagined in the future and, you know, actually bring them into the real world. And I think that's what's interesting to me. This is kind of the conversation that we often have between the stories we tell and the real world and whether we should change the real world to match the stories or the extent to which the stories then influence what happens next in the real world. There's this line between art for art's sake, art for activism's sake, all of those things, you know? It goes back to the life imitates art thing, right? Like, imitates life, et cetera, et cetera. Like, I think that's kind of what it makes me think about.

And that's, I agree with you that all of this stuff is kind of swirling together, right? Yeah. And what are we supposed to, if anything, do with that art? Is it just, oh, this was... You see a thinking machine. You better kill it fast. That's all I'm saying. Is it just this made for great material?

Yeah. Or is it art, imitation? life and it all feeds back into itself. And hopefully we learn something that informs the real-world decisions that we will make in the future. Well, and I think something also that jumps out to me of how specifically Samuel Butler imagined this future in connection to Darwin and evolution is that we have these ideas now, like, for instance, like what they call Black Box when it comes to an algorithm, where you kind of like set up the math. And then the math just maths itself with the information that you give it. And it sort of like spits out a result. And you actually don't exactly know how the math does the math inside of its black box math space.

To me, that's an example of this idea of evolution, getting to the point where like we're creating machines and we don't actually fully understand how they do what they do in some ways conceptually. but they do something. And then we are sort of amused and fascinated and sometimes scared by what they end up doing. But to a certain degree, they're starting to do things by themselves in this weird way. And I find that to be fascinating. Another thing that jumped out to me is that Samuel Butler was, his personal life was interesting. He lived in some ways a hard life. There is some speculation that he might have been gay.

He was supposed to go into the clergy but did not. His relationship with his parents, especially his dad, was very bad. His dad, he wrote that his dad was very abusive. So he had a lot of hardship in his life, no question. But he also, I think, comes from this class of men in the 1800s who had the privilege I would say to have enough money to like move around in the world and basically do that thinking about what the future might be, right?

To become a thinker and writer. I want to say I would not have laughed quite as hard if you had referred to him as, say, a philosopher. Even though a philosopher is a, you know, a professional thinker, but something about that, yes, felt very privileged. He would have done a TED talk for sure. Yes. Oh, yes.

Yep, he would have written some thinking. pieces. Yes, he would have been just an idea guy. You know what he call him today? A thought leader. A thought leader. So I think like to me, I am fascinated by this little side quest and story of how this very real person actually predicted a lot of what we experience today in the conversation around artificial intelligence and how we think about it. And did so so long ago. And did so so long ago. Yeah.

But I also think that we need lots of different kinds of people imagining the future. And I think it will be a better future if we can find ways to do that. That's my random thought. What is your Sievertsonian jihad view of the future? Well, there's this little song. that I wrote Ben and it goes imagine there's no countries

it isn't hard to do nothing to kill or die for oh man you should put some music in that that sounds like it could be a hit yeah you think people would be into that yeah they might play it on the radio incessantly okay we'll see well thank you for

filling me in on all things Samuel Butler and Dune yeah well Welcome to the Duneverse. Thank you. Dund, Dund, Dund. I don't know the Dune music, but that felt right.

Yeah, that feels right. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by me, Ben Brock Johnson, and Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by me, Amory Severson. And me, Benbrock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is our managing producer, Summata Joshi, Dean Russell, and our production manager, Paul Vicus.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between 19th century sheep farmers and thinkers and our 21st century nightmares. If you've got an unsolved mystery, an untold history, a prediction of the future, an internet story you want us to tell. Hit us up, endless thread at wbUR.org.