Why Is There No AI In Dune?
In Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films there’s plenty of futuristic tech, but talking robots are notably absent. Why is that?
Frank Herbert’s epic novel, Dune (1965), provides the backstory.
“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.”
In Terminator, the threat AI poses is external. It wants to make humans extinct.
In Dune, the threat is internal. It’s the erosion of human autonomy that enables oppression.
A recent study by Microsoft “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking” echoes this concern.
Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.
Dune is set thousands of years after humanity’s crusade against thinking machines.
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
A literal war against brain-rot!
Dogma
Herbert asserts that biological life has a unique spark, our will to live, that gives us authentic agency: it’s precisely what generative AI threatens to dull.
However, the dogmatic rejection of computers by the Orange Catholic religion and the Imperium, a feudal empire, isn’t framed as a good thing either.
See this excerpt from the article "In Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two, AI is nowhere ... and everywhere":
[…] both films play out against a backdrop of a society that long ago banished thinking machines from their lives. And they reflect a future where the core – the soul, or the essence – of what it means to be human is determined by biological and psychological manipulation (aided and abetted by the psychoactive and somewhat mystical “spice” or “melange”) rather than computer augmentation.
Dune centers around a civil war between factions of a galactic empire over the control of spice mining on the planet Arrakis.
Spice is so valuable because it gives spacecraft pilots limited prescience, enabling them to navigate space without help from computers. But if the Imperium hadn’t put an absolute ban on thinking machines, there’d be no need to colonize Arrakis or wage war over spice.
The ban on thinking machines doesn’t just preserve human agency: it narrows it.
By eliminating the computers used to enable one kind of tyranny, they entrenched another.