From prompts based on “AI as a god”, from Midjourney

Artificial intelligence lurks at the fringes of the political, social and political possibilities we chart in the Alternative Global. AI sometimes promises the enhancement of human agency, or its replacement, even transcendence. Sometimes it’s a threat to the integrity of the natural world—sometimes an evolutionary step in itself.

We look for commentary that matches the enormity of this moment. We found it this week in the venerable US current affairs magazine Harper’s, in this essay from Benjamin Labatut, titled ‘The Gods of Logic: Before And After Artificial Intelligence’. Excerpt below - and to subscribe to Harper’s for the full version, click here.

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps?

It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul.

But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was, never happened.

The Jihad was an imagined event, conjured up by Frank Herbert as part of the lore that animates his science-fiction saga Dune. It was humanity’s last stand against sentient technology, a crusade to overthrow the god of machine-logic and erad- icate the conscious computers and robots that in the future had almost entirely enslaved us.

Herbert described it as “a thalamic pause for all humankind,” an era of such violence run amok that it completely transformed the way society developed from then onward.

But we know very little of what actually happened during the struggle itself, because in the original Dune series, Herbert gives us only the faintest outlines—hints, murmurs, and whispers, which carry the ghostly weight of prophecy.

The Jihad reshaped civilization by outlawing artificial intelligence or any machine that simulated our minds, placing a damper on the worst excesses of technology. However, it was fought so many eons before the events portrayed in the novels that by the time they occur it has faded into legend and crystallized in apocrypha.

The hard-won lessons of the catastrophe are preserved in popular wisdom and sayings: “Man may not be replaced.” “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.” “We do not trust the unknown which can arise from imaginative technology.” “We must negate the machines-that-think.”

The most enduring legacy of the Jihad was a profound change in humankind’s relationship to technology. Because the target of that great hunt, where we stalked and preyed upon the very artifacts we had created to lift ourselves above the seat that nature had intended for us, was not just mechanical intelligence.

It was also the machinelike attitude that had taken hold of our species: “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments,” Herbert wrote.

Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program!

The Butlerian Jihad removed a crutch—the part of ourselves that we had given over to technology—and forced human minds to develop above and beyond the limits of mechanistic reasoning, so that we would no longer depend on computers to do our thinking for us.

Herbert’s fantasy, his far-flung vision of a devastating war between humanity and the god of. machine-logic, seemed quaint when he began writing it in the Sixties. Back then, computers were primitive by modern standards, massive mainframe contraptions that could process only hundreds of thousands of cycles per second (instead of billions, like today), had very little memory, operated via punch cards, and were not connected to one another.

And we have easily ignored Herbert’s warnings ever since, but now the Butlerian Jihad has suddenly returned to plague us. The artificial-intelligence apocalypse is a new fear that keeps many up at night, a terror born of great advances that seem to suggest that, if we are not very careful, we may—with our own hands—bring forth a future where humanity has no place.

This strange nightmare is a credible danger only because so many of our dreams are threatening to come true. It is the culmination of a long process that hearkens back to the origins of civilization itself—to the time when the world was filled with magic and dread, and the only way to guarantee our survival was to call down the power of the gods.

Apotheosis has always haunted the soul of humankind. Since ancient times we have suffered the longing to become gods and exceed the limits nature has placed on us. To achieve this, we built altars and performed rituals to ask for wisdom, blessings, and the means to reach beyond our capabilities.

While we tend to believe that it is only now, in the modern world, that power and knowledge carry great risks, primitive knowledge was also dangerous. In antiquity, a part of our understanding of the world and ourselves did not come from us, but from the Other. From the gods, from spirits, from raging voices that spoke in silence.

At the heart of the mysteries of the Vedas, revealed by the people of India, lies the Altar of Fire: a sacrificial construct made from bricks laid down in precise mathematical proportions to form the shape of a huge bird of prey—an eagle, or a hawk, perhaps. According to Roberto Calasso, it was a gift from the primordial deity at the origin of everything: Prajapati, Lord of Creatures.

When his children, the gods, complained that they could not escape from Death, he gave them precise instructions for how to build an altar that would permit them to ascend to heaven and attain immortality:

Take three hundred and sixty border stones and ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in a year Each brick shall have a name. Place them in five layers. Add more bricks to a total of eleven thousand, five hundred and fifty-six.

The gods built the altar and fled from Mrtyu, Death itself. However, Death prevented human beings from doing the same. We were not allowed to become immortal with our bodies; we could only aspire to everlasting works. The Vedic people continued to erect the Altar of Fire for thousands of years.

With time, according to Calasso, they realized that every brick was a thought; that thoughts piled on top of each other created a wall—the mind, the power of attention; and this constructed mind, when properly developed, could fly like a bird with outstretched wings and conquer the skies.

Seen from afar by people who were not aware of what was being made, these men and women must surely have looked like bricklayers gone mad. And that same frantic folly seems to possess those who, in recent decades, have dedicated their hearts and minds to the building of a new mathematical construct.

A soulless copy of certain aspects of our thinking that we have chosen to name “artificial intelligence”, A tool so formidable that, if we are to believe the most zealous among its devotees, will help us reach the heavens and become immortal.

Raw and abstract power, AI lacks body, consciousness, or desire, and so, some might say, it is incapable of generating that primordial heat that the Vedas call tapas—the ardor of the mind, the fervor from which all existence emerges—and that still burns, however faintly, within each and every one of us.

Should we trust the most optimistic voices coming from Silicon Valley, AI could be the vehicle we use to create boundless wealth, cure all ills, heal the planet, and move toward immortality, while the pessimists warn that it may be our downfall. Has our time come to join the gods eternal? Or will our digital offspring usurp the Altar of Fire and use it for their own ends, as we ourselves stole that knowledge, originally intended for the gods?

It’s far too early to tell. But we can be certain of one thing, since we have learned it, time and time again, from the punishing tales of our mythologies: it is never safe to call on the gods, or even come close to them...

…Are we really headed for obsolescence? Will humanity perish, not because of the way we treat all that surrounds us, nor due to some massive unthinking rock hurled at us by gravity, but as a consequence of our own irrational need to know all that can be known?

The supposed AI apocalypse is different from the mushroom-cloud horror of nuclear war, and unlike the ravages of the wildfires, droughts, and inundations that are becoming commonplace. This is because it arises from things that we have, since the beginning of civilization, always considered positive and central to what makes us human: reason, intelligence, logic, and the capacity to solve the problems, puzzles, and evils that taint even the most fortunate person’s existence with everyday suffering.

But in clawing our way to apotheosis, in daring to follow the footsteps of the Vedic gods who managed to escape from Death, we may shine a light on things that should remain in darkness. Because even if artificial intelligence never lives up to the grand and terrifying nightmare visions that presage a nonhuman world (where algorithms hum along without us) we will still have to contend with the myriad effects this technology will have—on human society, culture, and economics.

In the meantime, the larger specter of superintelligent AI looms over us. It is less likely and perhaps even impossible: nothing but a fairy tale, some say, a horror story intended to attract more money and investment, by presenting a series of powerful systems not as the next step in our technological development but as a death-god that ends the world.

However, it cannot be easily dispelled. For it reaches down and touches the fibers of our mythmaking apparatus—that part of our being that is atavistic and fearful, It reminds us of a time when we shivered in caves and huddled together, while outside in the dark, with eyes that could see in the night, the many savage beasts and monsters of the past sniffed around for traces of our scent.

As every new AI model becomes stronger, as the voices of warning form a chorus, and even the most optimistic among us begin to fear this new technology, it is harder and harder to think without panic or to reason with logic. Thankfully, we have many other talents that don’t answer to reason.

We can always rise and take a step back from the void toward which we have so hurriedly thrown ourselves, by lending an ear to the strange voices that arise from our imagination. That feral territory which will always remain a necessary refuge and counterpoint to rationality.

Faced, as we are, with wild speculation, confronted with dangers that no one, however smart or well informed, is truly capable of managing or understanding, and taunted by the promises of unlimited potential, we may have to sound out the future not merely with science, politics, and reason, but with that devil-eye we use to see in the dark: fiction.

We can find keys to doors we have yet to encounter in the worlds that authors have imagined in the past.

As we grope forward in a daze, battered and bewildered by the capabilities of AI, we could do worse than to think about the desert planet of the Dune novels. This is where Herbert’s protagonists sought to peer into the streaming sands of future time, under the heady spell of a drug called spice. They sought to find the Golden Path, a way for human beings to break from tyranny and avoid extinction or stagnation by being more diverse, resilient, and free.

The goal was to evolve past purely logical reasoning, developing our minds and faculties to the point where our thoughts and actions are unpredictable and not bound by statistics.

Herbert’s books, with their strange mixture of past and present, remind us that there are many ways in which we can continue forward while preserving our humanity. AI is here already, but what we choose to do with it and what limits we agree to place on its development remain decisions to be made.

Many billions of dollars will be invested in the AI companies that promise to eliminate work, solve climate change, cure cancer, and rain down miracles unlike anything we have seen before. Yet we can never fully give ourselves over to these mathematical creatures, these beings with no soul or sympathy, because they are neither alive nor conscious—at least not yet, and certainly not like us—so they do not share the contradictory nature of our minds.

In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.

But we should also consider a warning from Herbert, the central commandment he chose to enshrine at the heart of future humanity’s key religious text. A rule meant to keep us from becoming subservient to the products of our reason, and from bowing down before the God of Logic and his many fearsome offspring:

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

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“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”. From Dune, we may draw deep lessons on how to harness AI