Frank Herbert’s Dune made a chilling point about the future of AI, and this man is ragebaiting to make another.
“Reading Dune. Frank Hebert was cooking,” posts one X user, with a Dune quote attached. As the AI bubble continues to expand in every direction, Herbert’s quote feels oddly prescient.
“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.” As ChatGPT and its ilk separate people from the jobs and critical thinking skills, “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” seems like an increasingly logical commandment to follow. To illustrate this point, one man turned to ragebaiting in the comments, asking X’s AI Grok: “please explain this post and the quote in it, what should I understand about it?”
X seems to think so, at least according to this user. In the Dune mythos, the Butlerian Jihad was a war fought by humanity to overthrow oppressive “thinking machines” and their cyborg rulers. While OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman appears to be a human and not an android passing the Turing test with flying colors, the point still stands. According to a study from MIT, ChatGPT use has a negative effect on the brain. Researchers found that study participants who used AI for essay writing “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” when compared to their non-AI-using counterparts. As the Grok questioner ironically points out, AI use sends critical thinking skills down the tubes — and scientists are taking notice.
But was it actually irony at all? The internet seems divided on the issue.
Is It Time For Another Butlerian Jihad?
While one user called the post “the best instance of this particular genre of trolling I’ve seen” others weren’t sure if it was meant to be funny in the first place. “And here you are turning your thinking over to a machine,” writes one user, pointing out the obvious. “Idk if you did this on purpose but you did exactly what frank herbert wrote in that passage there,” wrote another. I’m not sure what’s more terrifying: that AI is eroding our brains or that people can’t tell if this guy is a victim of that neural degeneration.
“I so hope this is satire, but I feel it isn’t. We need the Butlerian Jihad — now,” adds another user. Hearing Sam Altman talk about the future of AI, a war against the machines might need to come sooner rather than later. “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” said Altman while speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, DC. Because what we all need is another utility bill to pay while AI drives up the cost of the ones we already have. AI data centers guzzle up astronomical amounts of water and electricity, leading to rising costs and further threatening an already damaged climate. Altman’s vision for the future is a disastrous one, and as long as humanity keeps outsourcing its critical thinking to machines, we might not be smart enough to see it.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
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