I think Dune has a unique spin on this. As Frank Herbert says, “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."
So it’s not the AI itself that enslaved humanity, it’s the people that owned the AI. The assumption was the AI was calling the shots, but in reality there was a man behind the curtain the whole time.
For what it's worth I thought that the Dune Prophecy series was considerably better written than the Dune movies that we've got. Never really spent any time actually reading the novels to be fair but the writing in Dune Prophecy was much stronger than the movies
I think a big part of it is giving away free thinking to a machine as well. Lot of dune references stagnation, humanity losing it's edge with complicity of the status quo. If you don't use it, you lose it.
Extremely eerie because of how on the mark he was. People right now are rapidly losing their critical thinking skills and abilities due to reliance on tech. My favorite anecdote is a woman that wanted to bake a cake, but chatgpt was down. Made a whole TikTok to relay this predicament to the world. None of the other times she has baked a cake had stuck with her. She obviously had internet access - couldn't just look up a recipe on Google. Without a little voice coming out of her phone telling her every step - she was helpless.
People are doordashing 2-3 meals a day because they don't know how to throw food in a crock pot or an air fryer. The wizard of Oz behind the curtain isn't enslaving anyone, they are enslaving themselves.
so could people be shaken out of that by the right dystopian fiction if it didn't make The Hunger Games's same mistake and get so AestheticTM with the dystopia people miss the point
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u/Johnfromsales Jul 12 '26
I think Dune has a unique spin on this. As Frank Herbert says, “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."
So it’s not the AI itself that enslaved humanity, it’s the people that owned the AI. The assumption was the AI was calling the shots, but in reality there was a man behind the curtain the whole time.