Butlerian Jihad

It's 2025. HBO's "Dune: Prophecy" is one of the most popular shows streaming, and the federal government just announced massive spending on artificial intelligence. The inspiration for "Dune: Prophecy" is in part a prophecy, of sorts, from 1872: One about humans becoming subservient to "thinking machines." What can a 150-year-old text teach us about the current AI revolution? Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:16Speaker 01

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• 0:32Speaker 02

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 0:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery, what level of Dune-iverse are you at? Like, do you use the spice must flow in passing conversation?

• 0:53Amory Sivertson?

  You would know this, yes, because I say it to you every morning, the spice must flow.

• 0:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you call your rabbit Moadeeb?

• 1:04Amory Sivertson?

  Only when I'm feeling spicy.

• 1:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you, do you in quiet moments scream out? For he is the Quizlet's Hatterack!

• 1:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you do that?

• 1:19Amory Sivertson?

  You know what's funny about this? I assume you're referring to Dune, the books, turned movies.

• 1:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25Amory Sivertson?

  I watched the first Dune movie on an airplane.

• 1:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Timotee one?

• 1:30Amory Sivertson?

  The Timotee one.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man.

• 1:32Amory Sivertson?

  On an airplane, which you're absolutely not supposed to do because

• 1:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  No.

• 1:36Amory Sivertson?

  the screen is tiny, the sound is bad.

• 1:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 1:39Amory Sivertson?

  And so I probably heard like one-fifth of the dialogue and would never have known any of the phrases you just uttered.

• 1:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fair. So like, you're not a Dune person?

• 1:49Amory Sivertson?

  Short answer, no.

• 1:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, we can continue talking.

• 1:52Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 1:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're gonna go forward.

• 1:54Amory Sivertson?

  This will, something will make sense to me.

• 1:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  You must not fear, fear is the mind killer.

• 1:59Amory Sivertson?

  More quotes.

• 2:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Don't worry about it.

• 2:01Amory Sivertson?

  More spicy quotes.

• 2:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  More spicy quotes.

• 2:03Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 2:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, so I'm gonna assume you're not watching the show Dune Prophecy on Max right now.

• 2:11Amory Sivertson?

  Who has the time? No, I'm not. I'm sure it's great, but I'm not.

• 2:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right. So the show takes place 10,000 years before the events of the movie Dune. That's like their opener.

• 2:25Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 2:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm gonna play you the beginning of this show. It's only about 25 minutes long, okay?

• 2:33Speaker 05

  When humans rose up against the thinking machines that had enslaved them.

• 2:41Speaker 05

  History says it was an Atreides who led them to victory.

• 2:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this show starts with what you could describe as a science fiction trope. Can you tell me what that trope is?

• 2:56Amory Sivertson?

  There's a battle scene, there's big robots, it's dark, there's fire, there's some screaming.

• 3:06Amory Sivertson?

  What am I missing?

• 3:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're not far, but what I'm looking for is a battle between humans and machines.

• 3:11Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, yes.

• 3:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right? Opposite sides, humans and machines.

• 3:16Speaker 05

  When war ended and all thinking machine technology was banned.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  History branded my family as cowards.

• 3:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  So in the Dune-verse, this is something called the Butlerian Jihad. Do you know what that is?

• 3:34Amory Sivertson?

  No.

• 3:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 3:36Amory Sivertson?

  Are robots butlers to humans? And then they rise up because they're sick of our funny business.

• 3:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  They're sick of us asking for some tea, the robot butlers. I like that, but, but no. So the original Dune books are by Frank Herbert. Later ones get written by his relatives. He starts in the 1960s, then he writes a couple more in the 1980s. His relatives write some in the 2000s.

• 4:04Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 4:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  One of those books, which comes out in 2002. And this is really the book that underscores this new TV show on HBO. That book is called The Butlerian Jihad, okay?

• 4:17Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 4:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Not about robot butlers, turns out.

• 4:20Amory Sivertson?

  Shucks.

• 4:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  So the original Dune books, the Duneiverse really kind of focuses on this desert planet, Arrakis, this battle over territory between dueling powers that are outside of the desert planet and the local population, right?

• 4:37Amory Sivertson?

  Is that what they were talking about?

• 4:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's what they're talking about.

• 4:41Amory Sivertson?

  Good to know.

• 4:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just, just so you know, you can start to see like the parallels that people will draw in the real world to the books. Desert, local population versus like these larger powers that are kind of battling over this desert place. This desert place has this like really important resource that allows people to travel. Is this sounding familiar in the real world? Is this, are you picking up what I'm putting down?

• 5:11Amory Sivertson?

  Yes.

• 5:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right. So anyway, people draw these parallels to a general area in the real world.

• 5:19Amory Sivertson?

  The Middle East.

• 5:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Middle East. And then in the 1980s, for instance, you have the US and Russia kind of battling over a specific country in, in the Middle East.

• 5:30Amory Sivertson?

  Afghanistan.

• 5:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Afghanistan. So, you know, the Dune books have some of the themes from the real world woven into them effectively. And people, you know, recognize that and, and talk about that in the way that they talk about the books.

• 5:45Amory Sivertson?

  I'm following.

• 5:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Really, the Butlerian Jihad in the Duneiverse is about this battle between man and machines. It's this conversation about artificial intelligence, really, and how it may impact the world. Now, in the Duneiverse, there's this singularity which gets out of control. Humans manage to defeat the machines after the machines get too powerful. And unlike the real world so far, humanity basically decides in the Dune books, we've gone too far. We need to ban thinking machines. We need to like pull all this stuff back, which is this kind of neat little plot device as to why AI doesn't actually exist in the Duneiverse.

• 6:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's this way of sort of later describing like, this is why AI isn't in these sci-fi books is because there was this like big battle and we all just, we all decided AI was a bad idea and that we should stop.

• 6:38Amory Sivertson?

  No, thank you.

• 6:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, thank you. We'll, we'll not be having that.

• 6:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Dune, uh, robot butlers, please do not bring us any intelligence. What's interesting to me about butlery and jihad in the Dune universe is it actually has some inspiration from even way back longer ago, which I think is kind of fascinating. Okay. So I think this inspo from way, way back in the day is a little bit worth exploring. We're going to go from the Dune universe, fully into our own universe after the break.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 7:49Speaker 06

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 7:58Speaker 00

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• 8:16Speaker 01

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• 8:31Speaker 07

  I'm Alison Aubrey, longtime health and science correspondent with NPR, and I've got a new podcast all about the science and wisdom of life after 50. It's called Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. We want to take you on a journey to help you explore all the opportunities to make change and feel good as you step into middle age and beyond from WBUR and NPR.

• 8:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Your Turn with Alison Aubrey from NPR and WBUR, supported by AARP. New episodes every Thursday.

• 9:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, so, but Larry and Jihad does not refer to robot butlers, as we have said.

• 9:11Amory Sivertson?

  Bummer.

• 9:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  It refers to this guy, Samuel Butler. Samuel Butler, who has really presumably never said anything like, "For he is the Quiz-It Hotterock." And the reason for that is when he lived. Can you guess when Samuel Butler was alive? With a name like Samuel Butler.

• 9:34Amory Sivertson?

  It's, it's gotta be like, the 1800s.

• 9:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's good. You got the right century, my friend.

• 9:42Amory Sivertson?

  Did you want more specific than that?

• 9:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, that's fine. I'll accept it. Born in 1835, died in 1902. What do you think he might have done for most of his life? A man named Samuel Butler, living in the 1800s.

• 9:56Amory Sivertson?

  I think he was a banker, Ben.

• 9:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you're not right, but that's not a bad guess. It's not a bad guess.

• 10:05Amory Sivertson?

  I think he was an aristocrat, Ben.

• 10:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, that's not far off, so.

• 10:12Amory Sivertson?

  I think, I don't know. What was he?

• 10:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  So he was a thinker.

• 10:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  And a writer.

• 10:21Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, sure.

• 10:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  And kind of a famous one at that. So he's probably most famous for this book that he wrote called Erwan.

• 10:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm sure you've heard of it.

• 10:33Amory Sivertson?

  It does, it sounds, it's, it sounds familiar. It sounds like it's.

• 10:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  It does, right?

• 10:36Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it sounds science fiction-y to me, actually.

• 10:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, Erwan is a satire of Victorian society. That's what the book is. It's kind of taking aims at the ills of Victorian society. And in this book, one of the things that is often cited is its picture, the picture it paints of how Victorian society would potentially fall into dystopia, led in part by the Industrial Revolution and the creation of machine consciousness.

• 11:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this is kind of like a proto depiction in some ways of AI, which I think is kind of interesting, right? Like, this is not, there's, there's no thinking machines in the 1800s.

• 11:19Amory Sivertson?

  Right?

• 11:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I think it's important to note some basic Butler bio bullet points here.

• 11:25Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, boy. Let's get some basic Butler bio bullet points, Ben.

• 11:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're smoking what I'm rolling and I appreciate it. This is a guy that in some ways was part of the British elite class. He goes to the Shrewsbury School at age 12.

• 11:44Amory Sivertson?

  It's pronounced Shrewsbury.

• 11:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Shrewsbury, yes. He goes to St. John's College at Cambridge. He studies the classics. He's on a trajectory to go into the Anglican clergy. But as Butler prepares to be ordained, he goes to a kind of slum in London to sort of like study up. And like on young Christians, I guess, young Anglicans.

• 12:09Amory Sivertson?

  Yep.

• 12:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  And he decides, you know what? Whether or not these kids get baptized makes no difference in their life trajectory. So this is kind of like a revelation for him. And he has this, Butler has this crisis of faith and he starts to think that Victorian society, this era of British Empire, where everything is ordered by class and industrialization is driving all kinds of booms in business and conquest. He starts to think all of this is pretty sus. And he has the privilege to do this. He's, you know, he also has the privilege to at some point forget the plans to go into the clergy and run away to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer and a thinker.

• 12:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  But there is one thing from the Victorian era that Samuel Butler seems to get behind. And this is the hottest scientific theory of the time, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. And Butler folds that idea and many other thoughts of the time into his writing. Samuel Butler is sort of like imagining the future in his writing and he lays out in this book, Erwan, this set of ideas. It's really sort of like three chapters in a book, I think, that really spring forth from an earlier essay that Butler wrote under a nom de plume called Darwin Among the Machines. So Darwin, as we said, sort of comes out right in the 1800s, right?

• 13:36Amory Sivertson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Darwin kind of inspires a lot of thinking at the time. And Darwin's ideas about evolution, some of which we don't necessarily subscribe to these days, but his thinking about evolution is something that is inspiring a lot of thought. And Samuel Butler is one of the thinkers that Darwin's work inspires. He comes up with this article published in a newspaper in 1863 in Christchurch, New Zealand, interestingly, which references Charles Darwin in the title, obviously, and really talks about something he called mechanical life going under evolution. This idea that like machines over time, they get better and better

• 14:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  and more powerful and more independent over time. And he imagines this future in which machines might actually supplant humans as the dominant species. So I'm going to ask you to read an excerpt.

• 14:34Amory Sivertson?

  "We refer to the question, what sort of creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be? We have often heard this debated, but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors. We are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organization. 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. In the course of ages, we shall find ourselves the inferior race."

• 15:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  What do you think about that?

• 15:17Amory Sivertson?

  I think it's true. Not the inferior race, but I think-

• 15:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Inferior races is, you know, we don't really wanna use that phrase these days. Not a good phrase.

• 15:27Amory Sivertson?

  But I, I think we have made machines very powerful at taking things off of our plates, so to speak. But, but I say, no, no, no, never inferior, because we can do things that machines will never be able to do. Machines just do not have beating hearts, and we do.

• 15:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 15:45Amory Sivertson?

  So.

• 15:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Can a machine be my plumber? I don't think so.

• 15:49Amory Sivertson?

  A machine can probably be your plumber someday. But can a machine, like, really turn your day around and really listen to you and make you feel heard?

• 16:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's a good question. Have you seen the movie Her?

• 16:07Amory Sivertson?

  God.

• 16:07Speaker 07

  Theodore, how long before you're ready to date? What do you mean? I saw in your emails that you'd gone through a breakup recently. I can't believe I'm having this conversation on my computer.

• 16:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's a couple of things that are interesting to me about this essay by Samuel Butler. Number one, this is written in the 1860s, right? Most of that idea in that little excerpt that you just read, it resonates with me too as, like, basically correct.

• 16:39Amory Sivertson?

  Right.

• 16:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Up to a point, maybe.

• 16:41Amory Sivertson?

  Well, 150-plus years later.

• 16:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I think that's really interesting, that we've basically been imagining this future for this long, and that someone like Samuel Butler imagined this future, but also that we're incorporating these ideas into science fiction. Science fiction inspires, I don't know, for instance, South African billionaires who wanna do stuff and then end up being government advisors. So like, someone like Elon Musk, basically being like, oh, no, no, no. I don't want us to build AI helpers for people. I wanna replace people with a form of AI that is made in the shape of humans, for instance. Or, you know, when Microsoft basically took the name Cortana from a video game, Halo, to make its very real assistant.

• 17:29Amory Sivertson?

  Or OpenAI taking the voice from her, basically Scarlett Johansson's voice and then using it as their voice.

• 17:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  And then her getting mad about it.

• 17:40Amory Sivertson?

  For their technology, yeah. Or for anyone who listened to our madness series, Dr. Yu and Cameron, the psychiatrist that was experimenting on the human mind, was inspired by Brave New World.

• 17:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, which is a book that does not have a good ending, by the way. Just saying.

• 17:58Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think there's nothing wrong with imagining the future, but we have to be thoughtful about how we take the things that we've imagined in the future and, you know, actually bring them into the real world. And I think that's what's interesting to me.

• 18:14Amory Sivertson?

  This is kind of the conversation that we often have between the stories we tell and the real world and whether we should change the real world to match the stories or the extent to which the stories then influence what happens next in the real world. There's this line between art for art's sake, art for activism's sake, all of those things, you know?

• 18:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  It goes back to the life imitates art thing, right? Like imitates life, et cetera, et cetera. Like, I think that's, that's kind of what it makes me think about. And that's, I agree with you that all of this stuff is kind of swirling together, right?

• 18:56Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and what are we supposed to, if anything, do with that art? Is it just, oh, this was-

• 19:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you see a thinking machine, you better kill it fast. That's all I'm saying.

• 19:06Amory Sivertson?

  Is it just this made for great material?

• 19:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Amory Sivertson?

  Or is it art imitates life and it all feeds back into itself? And hopefully we learn something that informs the real world decisions that we will make in the future.

• 19:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, and I think something also that jumps out to me of how specifically Samuel Butler imagined this future in connection to Darwin and evolution is that we have these ideas now, like, for instance, like what they call black box when it comes to an algorithm, where you kind of like set up the math and then the math just maths itself with the information that you give it and it's sort of like spits out a result and you actually don't exactly know how the math does the math inside of its black box math space.

• 19:58Amory Sivertson?

  Uh huh.

• 19:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  To me, that's an example of this idea of evolution getting to the point where like, we're creating machines and we don't actually fully understand how they do what they do in some ways conceptually, but they do something and then we are sort of amused and fascinated and sometimes scared by what they end up doing, but they're in, to a certain degree, they're starting to do things by themselves in this weird way and I find that to be fascinating.

• 20:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Another thing that jumped out to me is that Samuel Butler was, his personal life was interesting. He lived in some ways a hard life. There is some speculation that he might have been gay. He was supposed to go into the clergy, but did not. His relationship with his parents, especially his dad, was very bad. His dad, he wrote that his dad was very abusive. So he had a lot of hardship in his life, no question, but he also, I think, comes from this class of men in the 1800s who had the privilege, I would say, to have enough money

• 21:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  to like move around in the world and basically do that thinking about what the future might be, right? To become a thinker and writer.

• 21:25Amory Sivertson?

  I want to say I would not have laughed quite as hard if you had referred to him as, say, a philosopher, even though a philosopher is a, you know, a professional thinker, but... Something about that, yes, felt very privileged, like.

• 21:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  He would have done a TED Talk, for sure.

• 21:39Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. Oh, yes. Yep, he would have written some think pieces.

• 21:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes, he would have. Yes, yes. He would have been just an idea guy.

• 21:48Amory Sivertson?

  You know what he'd call him today? A thought leader.

• 21:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  A thought leader.

• 21:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I think, like, to me, I am fascinated by this little side quest and story of how this, like, very real person actually predicted a lot of what we experience today in the conversation around artificial intelligence and how we think about it.

• 22:14Amory Sivertson?

  And did so so long ago.

• 22:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  And did so so long ago.

• 22:17Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  But I also think that we need lots of different kinds of people imagining the future.

• 22:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I think it will be a better future if we can find ways to do that. That's my random thought.

• 22:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  What is your Svetersonian jihad view of the future?

• 22:45Amory Sivertson?

  Well, there's this little song that I wrote, Ben. And it goes, "Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for."

• 22:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man. You should put some music in that. That sounds like it could be a hit.

• 23:04Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah? You think people would be into that?

• 23:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, they might play it on the radio incessantly.

• 23:08Amory Sivertson?

  Okay. We'll see. Well, thank you for filling me in on all things Samuel Butler and Dune.

• 23:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. Welcome to the Dune-iverse.

• 23:19Amory Sivertson?

  Thank you.

• 23:21Amory Sivertson?

  Dune, dune, dune.

• 23:25Amory Sivertson?

  I don't know the Dune music, but that felt right.

• 23:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that feels right.

• 23:34Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

• 23:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was produced by me, Ben Brock Johnson, and Grace Tatter.

• 23:42Amory Sivertson?

  It was co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 23:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  And me, Ben Brock Johnson.

• 23:45Amory Sivertson?

  Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

• 23:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest of our team is our managing producer, Sumit Dajoshi, Dean Russell, and our production manager, Paul Vikas.

• 23:54Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between 19th century sheep farmers and thinkers and our 21st century nightmares.

• 24:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you've got an unsolved mystery, an untold history, a prediction of the future, an internet story you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR.org.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education. I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages. There are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 25:50Speaker 02

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