People are so rabidly anti-AI they’ll welcome their own slavery as long as it prevents what they really fear (change).

@tomieinlove Feudal hellscape? Did you read the book or had ai summarize it for you?

@tomieinlove in dune society replaced ai supercomputers with human ones called mentats, drug addicted mutants for travel, and a cabal of breeders. this is perhaps worse than if they stuck to ai because finite elite specialist humans are much easier to build empires around than buildings.

@Matthoxoo I read the book

@tomieinlove Life in the Dune impeeium is pretty good for the average citizen under faufreluches. People largely had an occupation, a family, a home, friends.

@Brindis_Pierrot @tomieinlove @Matthoxoo The planets are run by feudal lords with atomic weapons that are passed down within families

@tomieinlove And the revolution was to break the feudal control and have it all controlled for thousands of years by a single god-king and basically and space travel. 3500 years of a galaxy wide empire that just had walking for travel.

@tomieinlove @edgeofarete And this is different from the power level of the median individual today?

@tomieinlove The problem was the humans. The jihad just replaced thinking machines with humans doing what machines did and then ended up in the exact same place

@tomieinlove better to serve man than machine

@tomieinlove @Matthoxoo "The" book? Arrakis was specifically designed to be a serfdom hellscape, it was described as harsher than salusa secundus, the prison planets, other worlds where green and abundant, not serfdom-like

@tomieinlove I have no strong stance on AI either way, but I think “shackled serfs” is a personal read that’s not necessarily supported by the text. Other planets have hierarchies of their own- everyone less powerful than the dukes is not necessarily an enslaved peasant

@tomieinlove We know little or nothing about the lives of the subaltern in the Dune world. But billions dying in a universe of trillions would not be relatively much different than this current era.

@tomieinlove Herbert: here's multiple books showing the Butlerian Jihad fixed nothing. Us: but what if we ban the robots tho

@Matthoxoo @tomieinlove He's right? They explicitly live in a Feudal system run by a conglomeration of houses.

@tomieinlove i think also they stopped the other evil things in the galaxy from exterminating mankind

@Matthoxoo @tomieinlove It is a feudal hellscape.

By God Emperor people on planets mostly travel on foot.

@tomieinlove Doesn't that prove what the other guy is saying though? That we gave our power to think to computers and got enslaved by the elite with the same computers?

@tomieinlove Living as a serf or having your brain dissected by a computer because it wants to understand art. Living as a serf or having a robot throw your baby off a cliff because it thinks the baby takes too much of your attention. Decisions, decisions...

@InchoateElk @tomieinlove The God-Emperor (and so Paul by extension) did, but not the already existing Landsraad/Faufreluches system of social organisation, whose watch humanity would have gone extinct under.