2 pointsby alberto_yaakov3 hours ago2 comments
  • alberto_yaakov3 hours ago
    Butlerian Jihad (Wikipedia): The Butlerian Jihad is an event in the back-story of Frank Herbert's fictional Dune universe. Occurring over 10,000 years before the events chronicled in his 1965 novel Dune, this jihad leads to the outlawing of certain technologies, primarily "thinking machines," a collective term for computers and artificial intelligence of any kind. This prohibition is a key influence on the nature of Herbert's fictional setting.

    ... "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." ... The chief commandment from the Orange Catholic Bible, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind", holds sway, as do the anti-artificial intelligence laws in which the penalty for owning an AI device or developing technology resembling the human mind is immediate death. This leads to the rise of a new feudalistic galactic empire which lasts for over ten thousand years. ...

    To replace the analytical powers of computers without violating the commandment of the O.C. Bible, "human computers" known as Mentats are developed and perfected, their mental abilities ultimately honed to the point where they become superior to those of the ancient thinking machines. Similarly specialized groups of humans which arise after the Jihad include the Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal order with advanced mental and physical abilities, and the Spacing Guild, whose prescience makes safe, instantaneous space travel possible.

  • treetalkeran hour ago
    I tend to think it equally likely that the same corporations that cannot justify their LLM spending[1] need to shift the blame, and (unsurprisingly) the old, crotchety, and sociopathic who claw their way to positions of ownership, management, and other power find it both easy and convenient to target the younger generations, especially Gen Z.

    (In short: the Principal Skinner "the children are wrong" meme.)

    [1]: See the panoply of HN posts in recent months about how LLMs are great for eliminating workers' idiosyncratic drudgery, but workers cannot or do not reinvest that saved time/effort for non-software companies' benefit, hence non-software companies see no positive impact to their bottom lines.

    • casey2an hour ago
      In this case "finding a way to blame them" means a direct anonymous survey and some large percent saying "Yes I am actively sabotaging our companies the AI rollout"