A Survey of Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence

In the backstory of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe is an event called the Butlerian Jihad, a human revolt against “thinking machines.” Herbert himself provided few details of the Jihad in his books but the idea of a future without computers is foundational to many of the themes in his stories. The underlying philosophical justification for the Jihad, as later recorded in one of the Dune universe’s core religious texts, the Orange Catholic Bible, reads as follows: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” Though Herbert provided little other information in the six original Dune novels, it is clear that, in the universe of his stories, artificial intelligence had become a catastrophic problem for humanity. Now at the edge of advances in technology which have made artificial intelligence a reality, we have some questions to ask about what that means for us as humans. Transcript with citations and references available at https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/