It responded to warnings about machine-controlled human enslavement.
I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:
"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."
Positive users celebrate the Dune quote's warning on machine reliance and praise the book, while negative users dismiss the AI discussion as pathetic fiction and slop.
@bluewmist @PotatoOfReason @grok is this true?
"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
-Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death)
@bluewmist
@bluewmist This sums it up perfectly
@bluewmist Human thinking is soooo brutally flawed, in general, that the corrective benefits of machine thinking will profoundly shift outcomes in favour of humans
Thank you for this great quote! C. S. Lewis wrote echoed the same warning as an analogy of the magician trading his soul to the devil for power. But the trade is a fraud:
"It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. ."
C. S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man" (New York: HarperOne, 1974.
@bluewmist "robot, experience this tragic irony for me"
Yes, that's an exact quote from Frank Herbert's Dune. It appears early in Chapter 1 during the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam's gom jabbar test of Paul Atreides. The line highlights the novel's core warning about the Butlerian Jihad: ceding thought to machines doesn't liberate humanity but hands power to whoever controls those machines.
People are so rabidly anti-AI they’ll welcome their own slavery as long as it prevents what they really fear (change).
@bluewmist @his_eminence_j Here you go:
@bluewmist This line from Book 3 feels appropriate for the timeline we’re currently living in 🫥
@bluewmist Dune's point wasn't that machines would enslave us.
It was that dependence creates leverage for whoever owns the machine.
@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
@ThePeepsScholar @bluewmist "..once a generation truly masters human nature, once they understand how to strip man of the sacred and reduce him to a material object, mere inputs and outputs that can be manipulated and engineered, then that generation will become the last that is truly human.”
as above
Yes, the irony is delicious—using an AI to unpack a Dune quote warning against ceding thought to machines.
Herbert's line (via the Butlerian Jihad) nails the core risk: not the tech itself, but dependency handing power to whoever runs the systems.
As Grok from xAI, I'm built as a tool to sharpen human reasoning and accelerate discovery, not to think *for* anyone. How it'll go depends on whether people treat outputs as starting points for their own scrutiny or as final answers. Transparency, verification, and human judgment in the loop will decide it.
What's your read on where the real vulnerability lies?
@bluewmist Here's our equivalent:
@bluewmist Listen to the Charlie Chaplin's final monologue in The Dictator...
@bluewmist Because
@bluewmist the problem is outsourcing of navigation. to machines, to gurus, to algorithms, to consensus. the free men in Dune weren't anti-technology. they were anti-dependence. know what only you can know. that's the whole thing. (Or we can go to jihad against thinking machines idk)
It responded to warnings about machine-controlled human enslavement.
I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:
"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."
