In a time where the rapid development of machine learning has governments, thinkers and ordinary people alike baffled, can we look to science fiction for answers?
Frank Herbert’s Dune series is a leviathan of science fiction. Its scope is epic, complete with the intergalactic empires, space travel and obscure technology typical of modern space operas. That said, there is an immediate and very conspicuous difference between Dune and its successors – its universe, though set in a technologically advanced far-future, has no robots or sentient machines whatsoever.
Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with Dune’s age – even in the mid twentieth century early debates about machine sentience were burning hot (Alan Turing, 1950). The reason for the absence of AI is far more compelling – it has already come and gone in the universe of Dune, purged and outlawed 10000 years before the story’s beginning. This purge is known as the Butlerian Jihad, an event sparked by an AI’s decision to abort the pregnancy of a woman named Jehane Butler. The invasiveness of such an action evokes our modern anxieties about AI advancing to such an extent that it gains control over us. However, Dune’s commentary on AI is, generally, less catastrophising than this event would suggest, focusing largely on the philosophical implications of surrendering cognitive power over to machines.
The story’s protagonist – Paul Atreides – is reminded of the Jihad’s spiritual roots when the reverend mother, a religious leader, tells him: ‘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’ (Frank Herbert, 1965, p. 12). The enslavement that the reverend mother alludes to is not just in the literal sense. Dune is a narrative deeply concerned with human cognition, and we see the effects of purging AI everywhere in its universe. Paul’s mother Jessica, for instance, is a Bene Gesserit agent – a member of a shadowy, all female organisation which uses mental training to gain superhuman abilities, including the ability to read the emotions of others through their body language. A quasi-religious order, the Bene Gesserit manipulate figures of authority across the universe and plant theological seeds in nascent cultures in an effort to advance humanity along their particular path of desired progress. Similar to the Bene Gesserit in this sense are the Mentats, who, in lieu of AI, are effectively human computers trained to recall and process vast amounts of information.
Interestingly, both the Bene Gesserit and the Mentats use technology to facilitate their mental powers, but it is technology in an entirely different sense. They use the drug ‘melange’ – a rare and valuable spice – which, through its psychedelic effects, massively enhances human awareness and cognition. In this sense, Dune is rooted in the 1960s by its interest in psychedelic exploration. It is significant that Herbert, faced with philosophical questions of machine intelligence as well as the spiritual psychedelic movement, has his far-future universe advance along the lines of the latter. There is a strong implication that the purge of AI unfettered not only human endeavour but the human mind from its ‘enslavement’; that the presence of machine intelligence was a stifling one which prevented human cognition from reaching its full potential. Primož Krašovec describes this aptly in his essay ‘The World of Dune as a Future Without AI’:
‘When technology becomes material, spirituality atrophies and becomes religious…In the world of Dune, the reverse takes place – it is the development of machine intelligence that atrophies, opening up the space for an intense spiritual renaissance’ (Primož Krašovec, 2024, p.24).
Clearly, Dune makes a case for flourishing human potential when interference from machines is removed. But, on the other hand, the harsh politics and rigidly controlled society of the series tell another story, and this is where the prescience of Herbert’s work, for me, ultimately lies. Human civilisation in Dune has returned to a premodern caste system. It is ruled over by a single emperor who divides power between a handful of great houses, of which the Atreides family is one. By presenting a far-future world governed by blood-ties, subterfuge, and inter-house warfare, Herbert tempers the emancipatory message of Dune’s spiritual exploration with a picture of civilisation that is socially regressive and inegalitarian to the extreme.
This presentation of a civilisation regressed can, in part, be understood through the lens of economics. Krašovec makes the point that capital itself shows a form of autonomous intelligence and that its insatiable appetite for speed and efficiency ‘intensifies technological development… as well as turns it away from any human intentions and considerations’ (Krašovec, 2024, p.20). For Krašovec, the Butlerian Jihad is necessarily an anti-capitalist struggle which is reflected in the feudal and authoritarian universe that the revolution against machines ultimately creates. This notion reflects that of the accelerationist movement, which holds that phenomena of social and technological significance are now happening too quickly for human decision making to elicit any control over them. Nick Land, a prominent thinker in the accelerationist movement, describes civilisation as trapped in a
‘Positive feedback circuit, within which commercialisation and industrialisation mutually excite each other in a runaway process from which modernity draws its gradient… Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen’ (Nick Land, 2017).
Does Dune, therefore, invite us to hold our own 21st century version of the Butlerian Jihad; to rise up against machines in order to regain control of our destiny? Although it can be interpreted as such, I think Herbert’s novels are so prescient because they highlight the centrality of the AI question to our particular moment in history, not because they illustrate aa particular, desirable path. Aaron Bastani has compared Dune’s technocratic world to Yanis Varoufakis’ ideas about techno-feudalism (Aaron Bastani, 2024). Indeed, the transfer of power from social institutions to tech-elites like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos evoke Dune’s world, where the faster-than-light travel powering intergalactic exchange is monopolised by the spacing guild: an immense and shadowy conglomerate free from the accountability of capitalist competition.
The idea that AI is central to our moment in time finds expression in Dune’s radically reorganised society. Science fiction differs from fantasy because, at its best, it operates using the same logic as our own world, allowing us to imagine alternate scenarios. The spiritual renaissance in Dune after the removal of AI does, I think, warn us of surrendering too much power to machines; not because we risk being betrayed by AI but because our reliance on it could soften us mentally.
On the other hand, the accelerationist perspective which holds that advances like AI are inevitable is hard to ignore. I believe that the result of this thought experiment tells us that, at the very least, we should be aiming to bring AI under democratic control instead of having the free market decide, in its own autonomous way, what comes next. Whether they are collectivist or free market, governments should look at machine intelligence as a tool whose rate of development they can control. Sadly, it seems that at the moment they see AI only as dollar signs or as a potential advantage over rival nations (John Mullins, 2025). Dune – a novel obsessed by culture and its relationship with technology, highlights to us that there are other options. We need to be considering those options soon, for technology, AI or not, appears to move forward with a mind of its own and if we are complacent, we risk being left behind.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Herbert, Frank, Dune, (London: Mullins, 2015).
Secondary Sources
Bastani, Aaron, ‘The Dune Films Are the Most Important of the 2020s. But Not for the Reasons You Think’ Novara Media, < https://novaramedia.com/2024/03/20/the-dune-films-are-the-most-important-of-the-2020s-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/ >, posted 20/03/2024, accessed 16/06/2025.
Land, Nick, A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’, Obsolete Capitalism, < http://obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.com/2017/05/nick-land-quick-and-dirty-introduction.html> posted 26/05/2017, accessed 18/06/25.
Mullins, John, ‘Deconstructing J.D Vance’s Speech on AI’, London Business School, < https://www.london.edu/think/deconstructing-jd-vance-speech-on-AI>, posted 06/03/2025, accessed 18/06/2025.
Krašovec, Primož, ‘The World of Dune as an
Alternate Future Without AI’, Film and Politics: Edited Book from the International Scientific Conference Held on the 18th and 19th of March 2024 in Belgrade, Article 1, 2024.
Turing, Alan, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, Vol. 59, 1950.
Kasper Mcleish 
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