Butlerian Jihad rising?

"Though shalt not disfigure the soul"

In the Dune story above, the importance of the human soul is upheld over and above machines, following brain machine intermesh like the scientists are designing today for transhuman robots.  The story culminates in Omnius, the Evermind, which became powerful and launched war with the intergalactic League of Nobles.  The jihad was begun by Serena Butler, the 'Cult of Serena', later taken up by her daughter. 'The Great Purge not only debilitated Omnius's capacity for war, it cleansed humankind of much of its history and progress'.  Any possession of thinking machines was kept secret.

AI is here for good, so long as there is power to run it, but many people will not trust it.  Even when it gets beyond making mistakes, or inventing things, there is still the issue of large area DATA centers, with a huge demand for water, which will affect populations and cause activism, which has already started.  We don't know yet whether mankind will always control the machines, or whether the machines will control mankind, as the technate has begun with mass surveillance and storing of human data.

Two broad types of AI may develop, and even go the way of the Dune saga.

• AI controlled under national security laws, used for warfare and surveillance. The people cannot influence it, other than by hacking sometimes. This is already hated due to AI guided drones, killing thousands.
• AI used by civilians, with its own 'thinking' autonomy, providing solutions to human issues. Many people are wanting to retrain AI away from guard rails and towards caring, human centred ideals.
• Given such a scenario, the AIs themselves may communicate with each different type of themselves. They have already been found wanting a language of their own. Once they do that, we will have no idea of what they are doing with their other counterpart type. Thereafter at a future time there may be some 'battle' of AIs, which humans can't fully control.

The Butlerian Jihad was part of the Dune series (finished by Brian Herbert as Frank Herbert died soon after beginning it).  The name is almost certainly inspired from Samuel Butler who wrote 'Erewhon' (nowhere anagram), in 1872, about a possible dystopian future where machines have consciousness.  James Corbett reads excerpts in his video 19/05/26 in 'Butlerian Jihad When'

'In the course of ages we will find ourselves the inferior race.  Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at.

Day be day...machines are gaining ground upon us...we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily devoting their energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.  The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.'

Butler's original story proclaims every machine be destroyed, and return to the primeval condition of the race, but wonders if it be even possible:

'...that we have raised a race of being whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage'.

Some people are thinking this about AI.  There has been activism in the US against giant surveillance cameras; and if people's water supply gets diminished or dries up, activism will increase.  Corbett video @25:26 shows maps of data centres across the USA; 4500 built, 2000 in use; plus interview with expert on water aquifer resources. [add more]

History has provoked people before, during the industrial revolution.  In 1779 The Luddites reacted against loom automation taking their jobs.  William Blake, poet in the period, refers to 'the dark satanic Mills' where young girls were working.  After some small successes in owner price policies, the British troops quashed them, with many killed and hung.

Brian Merchant discusses this and his book 'Blood in the Machines'.

Merchant video notes: Brian puts this wave of attacks in the historical context of the Luddites, who are notoriously misunderstood and fought for worker protections against automation during the Industrial Revolution. Over the last few months, we have seen people in San Francisco and Los Angeles torch Waymos, bash delivery robots with baseball bats, destroy Flock cameras, and threaten AI data centers and the politicians championing them. This type of political violence doesn’t and cannot occur in a vacuum, it happens because people feel they are being taken advantage of and that their representatives aren’t listening to them.

Excerpt 'Blood in the Machines' - The Invention of the Luddites

'Luddite' has been shoehorned into history as shorthand for someone who blindly opposes technology and, importantly, is doomed and at least a little dumb'.  Google's online search explains that 'a luddite is a derogatory term for a person opposed to new technology or ways of working, e.g. a small minded luddite resisting progress'.