Already 102 years before Dune, a shepherd predicted the dangers of AI

AI is an omnipresent topic nowadays. Whether in movies and series, but also in everyday life. There is not only great potential but also some dangers. 162 years ago, a letter from a sheep breeder appeared, who foresaw much of this.

The issues and discussions surrounding AI have been a ubiquitous topic for a few years now. However, long before that, writers or filmmakers warned of possible dangers. In 1863, over 70 years before one of the first computers, the Z3 from 1941 (Source: swb.de), a British writer and sheep breeder apparently foresaw the dangers.

162 years ago, Samuel Butler published the letter Darwin among the Machines (in English: Darwin among the Machines), which was published in the newspaper The Press.

At that time, the concept of today’s AI did not exist, and Butler wrote about machines. In the letter, he explained that people are becoming more and more submissive to the machines every day, that they are becoming slaves that they must serve. Even more fitting to today’s AI is the following passage:

We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race
Excerpt from Darwin among the Machines by Samuel Butler (Source: iflscience.com)

This idea and opinion about machines are a central theme in many science fiction stories. Almost 100 years later, in 1965, the first Dune book by Frank Herbert was published. Even though there is no official connection, the background of the book contains some elements from Butler’s letter.

Trailer zum Science-Fiction-Blockbuster „Dune“

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The War Against the Machines

What does all this have to do with Dune? Anyone who looks closely at Dune notices: There is no major technological progress, even though space travel and other sci-fi ideas are possible. This is due to the Butlerian Jihad. 201 years before the founding of the Spacing Guild, there was a major slave uprising of humans against the machines in Dune.

The associated technology was destroyed in the war, and it was decided not to build any more machines that could think like humans. At the end of his letter, Butler writes:

War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown… If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done.
Excerpt from Darwin among the Machines by Samuel Butler (Source: themarginalian.org)

Butler himself thus calls for a war against the machines before it is too late. Before the “Butlerian Jihad,” humans were subjected to the machines. Butler also had interesting visions regarding this, which he compared to domestic and farm animals:

Man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state.
Excerpt from Darwin among the Machines by Samuel Butler (Source: themarginalian.org)

Before the Butlerian Jihad, humans were enslaved by thinking machines and treated like animals. Among them, there were privileged humans who were to supervise the other slaves. Hrethgir was a derogatory term. The term describes the chaotic and irrational nature of humans (Source: Dune Wiki).

One could even suspect that the term “Butlerian Jihad” is a reference to Samuel Butler in relation to Dune, but there has never been confirmation of this from Frank Herbert.