Timothy Cumfield 🍁

Ever notice that in Dune humans fly spaceships between planets but don't use a single computer? That's not a plot hole. It's completely on purpose. The movies barely explain why, but once you know, almost everything else in Dune starts to make sense. About 10,000 years before Paul Atreides, humans did exactly what we're doing right now. They built thinking machines to make life easier. They let the machines do their work and make their decisions, hoping it would set them free. Instead, the people who controlled those machines gained the power to enslave everyone else. Humanity eventually fought back in a holy war called the Butlerian Jihad, and won. The thinking machines were destroyed. To make sure it would never happen again, they made one rule sacred: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." But getting rid of computers created a problem: who would do their work? The answer was humans. Mentats are trained from childhood to think like computers. Navigators use the spice to glimpse the future and steer ships safely through space. The Bene Gesserit spend generations pushing the human mind and body to their limits. Every superpower in Dune exists for one reason: there are no computers. That's my favorite thing about Dune. It's also the most terrifying. Dune isn't a future without AI. It's the future after AI. Frank Herbert wrote that in 1965.