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As companies destroy the world in pursuit of profits that will never come, I welcome our Butlerian Jihad (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 hours ago by cannedtuna@lemmy.world to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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For those unfamiliar the Dune series, the Butlerian Jihad was a crusade against “thinking machines”. Ultimately computers, and intelligent or thinking machines, even down to calculators are destroyed and banned. Humans who are trained in complex mental maths become known as Mentats, a sort of human computer. Just, uhh, leave all that shit on IX, with their Axalotl Tanks out of it.

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[-] rozodru@piefed.world 12 points 5 hours ago

and then you have Warhammer 40K where Big E said that AI is heresy cause it practically wiped out mankind. buuuuut "machine spirits" and all that? yeah that's fine as long as a competent human or semi-human is at the wheel. except very few of them actually know how anything works. I mean hell they have these walker things that they can't turn off cause no one knows how to turn them back on.

[-] huppakee@piefed.social 14 points 6 hours ago

I deduct that grok wasn't funny since the reply is not in the screenshot, too bad though.

[-] qarbone@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago

*deduce, in case you're not a native English speaker. "Deduct" is like "subtract".

I can't think a response from Grok that would add to the tableau. Whether Grok gets the answer right or wrong, the joke is that someone follows a post decrying the surrender of thought to machines by immediately surrendering thought to a (racist) machine. It's complete.

[-] huppakee@piefed.social 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

*deduce, in case you're not a native English speaker. "Deduct" is like "subtract".

Somehow deduce to me sounds like some rich French lady, but merci mon ami, that is the word i meant. And i do agree, the meme is not incomplete this way.

[-] Jaberw0cky@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago

Can I just point out to everyone it is a lot easier to take this point on board now and wage jihad against the machines before they achieve sentience and take over.. if you work for an ai company or any other big tech company in any position from floor cleaner to management get busy asap and fuck it up from the inside..

[-] MerryJaneDoe@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

...get busy asap and fuck it up from the inside…

Easier said than done. Security and risk mitigation is one of the first (if not the very first) concern of any IT company in this day and age.

I've been a system engineer. Digital assets are locked down, meaning that I couldn't access anything outside of my scope (which was small and midsize banking websites). Physical assets (servers) sat in three remote locations, highly secure and staffed by a different team. Everything is backed up 5 different ways in 5 different places. Every keystroke is logged. Every door uses a passcard.

It's built to be a trustless system of sorts, where no single person holds the keys to anything too important. Regular audits and individual accountability for every outage are the norm. About the only way to fuck it up would be to somehow incite a mass exodus of seasoned engineers.

I think what people often miss about these systems (not just IT, but all of our systems from finance to healthcare) is that they are supported by very intelligent, motivated individuals. These people are fighting hard to make sure that nobody can fuck up their work. They aren't sitting ducks - they are nigh impenetrable sentries.

[-] Jaberw0cky@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Good information, something to think about definitely, but I would say it shows that the best placed people to undermine these systems and companies are people with the professional and inside knowledge.

[-] SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev 1 points 2 hours ago

You didn't understand the assignment. It's all about small things. Accidentally cancel a important meeting between higher ups. Put some gunk in the administrators keyboard, which requires a wasteful support ticket to IT. If everyone does there job at 98% competence, the company loses 2% production as a whole.

[-] pipe01@programming.dev 67 points 9 hours ago

The torment nexus

[-] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 11 points 6 hours ago

No Child Left Behind destroyed this country far more effectively than I ever would have suspected.

[-] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 hours ago

The culture was fucked long before no child left behind to be fair. Anti intellectualism was rampant, since before most of us were born, gangster culture and drug prohibition and The Fear made a solid percent of the population criminals and authorized a police state.

City schools are better now than they were in the 80s and 90s, things got real bad in the crime waves.

[-] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Yeah I mean a casual chain can be traced back to the big bang. But looking at the entirety of history, you tend to look for certain let inflection points.

So in my mind, traveling from Present backwards in time, the journey looks like this in my mind:

Present :: Idiocracy 1st :: No Child Left Behind 2nd :: Bush elected 3rd :: Clinton Glass Steagle 4th :: Reagan 5th :: Nixon

I can zoom in anywhere along that timeline to talk about how each event impacted this topic.

Lemme know if you want to explore any of that like for example what did Reagan do to impact education today long after his death.

[-] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

As I was saying on another thread, this current fuckery dates back to the Business Roundtable of 1971, big business huddled up and made a game plan to seize control. They got their asses kicked out of power from FDR and kept losing. Project 2025 is just the newer iteration of that game plan. Part of that plan clearly is to keep us disunited and destroy any competing organizations, and or take control of them secretly like with our opposition political party, not much of a secret to many of us I know.

The only answer is to organize, and to do that we need new social media, that we control. Like the fediverse, but set up better. But we needed it 20 years ago. Next best time is now.

[-] logi@lemmy.world 9 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Since we're talking sci-fi, this is Asimov in 1980:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

[-] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

♥️ That's one of my favorite quotes of all time.

[-] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

While there may be some truth in that, I don't think it's accurate to say it's always been there as such, in fact I believe it didn't really start in it's current form until 1971 or so, by design, although it existed before as it does elsewhere, that was the turning point, where big business huddled up and made a long game to seize power, project 2025 is just the recent iteration of that game plan, formed initially by the Business Roundtable.

[-] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I mean we burned witches in the dark ages right, so the behavior dates back at least as far as that.

[-] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 points 3 hours ago

Yeah but then the machines join with bestest boi ever and make the real savior so it kinda gets ruined.

[-] balthazarsnakewizard@lemmy.world 44 points 10 hours ago

It’s kind of crazy how prescient the original novels were about AI, and how much that was undone by Brian Herbert - the Butlerian Jihad was such a consequential event that even ten thousand years later, the theocratic feudal oligarchy that runs the universe still refuses the break the taboo that it set across countless religions and capital interests, and the best reasoning Brian Herbert could come up with for why this was such a huge taboo was “a giant robot enslaved humanity ten thousand years ago.”

[-] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 11 points 10 hours ago

Right? I just couldn’t with his novels, they come no where close to Frank’s writing expertise.

[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

They felt stilted, directionless, and shallow. I really wanted them to be decent, but gave up after two.

[-] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

… crazy how prescient the original novels were …

ftfy

[-] Hackworth@piefed.ca 47 points 11 hours ago

They then proceeded with the enslaving, sans computer.

[-] TachyonTele@piefed.social 14 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Is Alan anyone note worthy, or is he just a random moron?

EDIT: He's daring grok to explain it. Looks like im the moron here!

[-] abfarid@startrek.website 8 points 8 hours ago

That response tweet is clearly too on the nose to not be ironic.

[-] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 20 points 11 hours ago

No clue. Checkmarks mean fuck all on that platform.

[-] knightly@pawb.social 5 points 11 hours ago

Professor of Religion at James Madison University, published in a few journals and had an article in Wired about Go (the board game) ten-ish years ago.

[-] balthazarsnakewizard@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago

So is he just joking, or very stupid?

[-] knightly@pawb.social 24 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

It reads like a joke to me, and his published works suggest he's not one to meekly take things at face value: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&citation_for_view=EEdRH98AAAAJ%3A0EnyYjriUFMC

[-] slothrop@lemmy.ca 12 points 10 hours ago

methinks folk are missing that he's tweeting at grok, asking it to disseminate the quote....

[-] Triumph@fedia.io 4 points 10 hours ago

I totally missed that, thank you. Changes everything.

[-] Manjushri@piefed.social 15 points 10 hours ago

I read it as a joke, and a good one, in my opinion. He's asking a supposedly thinking machine to explain a passage about thinking machines being used to enslave people.

[-] logi@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

For once I'd like to see grok's response. But not enough to actually go on there...

[-] TachyonTele@piefed.social 3 points 6 hours ago

Yup, I see that now. Lol most of us completely missed it

[-] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

It has begun

[-] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

That's a fun way to have the mirror turned back on the bot.

this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
488 points (99.6% liked)

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