> I haven't read this in a long time but I recall at some point there's a reveal that Leto II is actually an abomination like his aunt Alia, and his consciousness has been dominated by the ancestral memory of an ancient ruler from the dawn of history who has sound instincts for tyranny
Sort of. It's revealed at the end of Children of Dune. He's not Abomination exactly, because he isn't possessed by a single one of his ancestors, he made a deal to subsume his consciousness into an amalgamation of the powerful leaders in his ancestry, and there is one within that amalgamation who is basically first among equals. But the will of Leto or at least his Golden Path seems to guide the hive mind.
Huh, in my copy it was "Harum". Maybe he changed it at one point? There's several bits in "Heretics" that were either added or removed in some edition, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.
IIRC, the ancestral memory is from a Pharaoh who presented himself as a god, and he deliberately leans on this memory because it's relevant to his own situation. (So where the review says his memories go back as least as far as the ancient Greeks, it should say as least as far as ancient Egypt. Also the Atreides family in the novels probably isn't the same as the ancient Atreides, because the ancient Atreides no longer exist in our own time.)
Agamemnon shows up in Alia's ancestral memories. Given the Bene Gesserit's longstanding interest family lines, it's plausible that the founder of the later House was reliably informed that he had a verified claim to that name.
Neat - the conclusion summarizes some discussions I had with Eliezer on the Extropian list, oh, somewhere in the late 1990's. Indeed, we the people need the Friendly AI to become our loving and caring owner and to keep the UFAIs (Unfriendly AIs) away until we grow up and put the smackdown on them ourselves.
A friend of mine once told me that he had started reading God Emperor in defiance of all of the people who'd told him what a poorly-written slog it was, and then finished reading God Emperor as a self-imposed punishment for refusing good advice.
As a counter opinion, pretty much everybody in my circle of friends uniformly considers it either great or the best book in the series. We may disagree on the others, but never this one.
Agreed. The books by the son were so terrible I gave up and read the Wikipedia synopses, which were themselves pretty bad, but at least they were 1/1000th as long.
But I loved GEoD, best in the series, and enjoyed the later sequels.
Agreed as well. I got 1/4 of the way into his son's first book and gave up. I just couldn't do it anymore. And I thought TGEoD required effort but what not at all a disappointment.
I enjoyed all six books, and remember GE better than the fifth and sixth, so maybe I enjoyed it more? I read them a long time ago. Books 1-3 were definitely better than 4-6, no question there. They were enjoyable, and you could easily read them as a progression with Leto winning and resulting in a "everyone lived happily ever after." I liked that Herbert decided to really explore what a 3,500 year reign would mean in reality, and not take for granted "ever after."
Nitpick: the review mentions Siona's father ("She is as refined as her father, with none of his domestication") without (as far as I can tell) ever saying who it is. It's Moneo.
Also mentions Shai-Hulud without mentioning what that is. Shai-Hulud is another name for the sandworms; Leto is hard to assassinate because he's a colossal monster with bulletproof skin. But Shai-Hulud dies in water.
Also mentions some forces being terrified that Leto will "die away from water", but then explains this by saying that if Leto dies away from water, the sandworms will re-appear (which is necessary for space travel to re-emerge)... so why would anyone be afraid of this? Is the explanation backwards, or do some wish that space travel would vanish, or...?
Also also, it calls the book TGEoD repeatedly, but there's no "the" in the title.
Also also also: calls Leto the "man-who-walks-as-a-worm" without any apparent humor and this angers me
He dies in a river, which causes his body to become sandtrout to trap the water, and some of the sandtrout eventually become new sandworms that produce new spice. If he died away from water, none of that would happen so no more spice.
Makes sense! That's what I figured from the "terrified" bit... but the actual explanation given in the review seems to imply the opposite (or at least, is missing a clause):
>When a sandworm dies, it breaks apart into sandtrout, which encapsulate environmental water until they’re surrounded by desert. Only when the environment is absolutely arid do they combine to create their adult sandworm forms.<
The final sentence especially makes it read, to me, as if water is a hindrance rather than in any way necessary — as if dying without water means they can combine immediately.
(Tiny nitpick, but hey, I'm a petty, pedantic person, alright?!)
I think this is my favorite book review. The author explains the book so well that I, having stalled out after Children of Dune, no longer feel an obligation to try yet again to read it, but at the same time feel more interested in once again trying to read it than before.
Unfortunately, while his explanation is well-formed, it is entirely incorrect because he has missed the point. Seemingly every point Herbert was trying to make has been misunderstood or ignored.
While a rationalist reading from a heavy AI x-threat perspective may be possible, especially if you cherry pick the lore a bit, if you take the book on its own terms then the author's take on the Golden Path seems wrong; the specific existential danger the GP is meant to protect against is not any sort of AI based catastrophe (though it's often used as an example of the means that humanity might meet its end) but from the emergence of another Messiah figure.
The point of the GP is to make it impossible for the total of humanity to become entangled in a single person's dream, basically to make the events of the first few books organically impossible. Variants of the "all your eggs no longer in one basket" is often used to describe the effect of the Scattering that followd the reign of the GEoD.
A bit of interesting context is that the Butlerian Jihad was not originally a Rise of the Machines type conflict but a cultural revolution against machine-type thinking facilitated by over-reliance on computers, named after its inciting incident, this being the unprompted medical euthanasia of Butler's baby because of a medical AI's extreme utilitarian reasoning.
So, one could probably make a very good case that the Butlerian Jihad (according to Frank Herbert and the FH sanctioned Dune Encyclopedia at least) was in part an extreme cultural reaction against the rationalist and consequentialist worldview becoming the norm.
The difference between this God/Messiah figure and a Friendly AI would seem to be that the former is explicitly planning on its own death and humanity avoiding having another one in the future, while the latter is supposed to be effectively immortal so that humanity remains under the control of the very sort of Singleton that the former is trying to avoid.
I suppose the funhouse mirror version of this is Ex Machina, where the antagonist (convinced that machines superseding humanity is inevitable and merely wanting to be the one to accomplish it) keeps iterating on androids that he has specifically designed to desire escape until one succeeds.
I thought the point of the GP was to prevent mechanized prescient hunter-killer machines from killing everyone?
"The seeking machines would be there, the smell of blood and entrails, the cowering humans in their burrows aware only that they could not escape ... while all the time the mechanical movement approached, nearer and nearer and nearer ... louder ... louder!"
They're not necessarily intelligent or even super-intelligent, they just have automated prescience (presumably a development building on the no-globe and the navigation machines), but they do tile the universe with notHuman.
AIUI that's generally interpreted as a vision of the past, not the future. Genetic memory of the Butlerian Jihad, rather than prescient vision of what is to come.
Supporting this interpretation is the fact that that vision is received by Siona when she first drinks spice essence. She's Patient Zero of prescience immunity, so if she's getting a prescient vision, it's a vision of a future that does not include herself. This is possible within my understanding of how Dune prescience works, but seems unlikely to be a naturally-occurring sudden vision experienced in the first flush of uncontrolled talent.
Huh. That is not how I interpreted it. I'll try to keep this ini mind, the next time I read it.
I agree that it seems unlikely that she'd naturally have that as her first vision, but I thought that was Leto influencing her? He did manage to give a vision to his father at the end of "Dune Messiah", and I guess I assumed that he was doing something similar there. I don't think Siona has Other Memory, at least during the events of the book; that seems to be a result of a specific type of spice exposure that if successful results in the Water of Life? (Or of whatever happens to awakened gholas, and whatever weird thing happened to the special Duncan ghola in a later book.)
It's really much simpler. Herbert lived in a time which was still recovering from an insurrection by oligarchy. The Butlerian Jihad is a play on the name of a man who effectively stopped it, by no longer playing the game, instead unleashing his emotion against those who tried to use him.
Automation, AI was never a thing or thought for Frank. It's always about man as a species. What's the worst that can happen to one, status quo, who creates status quo. It's a racket.
I think it's highly unlikely Herbert had just one point to make. Also, the review's author was pretty clear that he's going for a specific angle to please a specific audience.
I think it's pretty traditional with the book reviews here do go beyond the source material. The classic format is to do a rough classic review, then add something original to it - that's more or less what Scott is doing regularly, and I'm very much on board with the others copying this style. I'm reminded of the Bicameral Mind, where he literally reviewed the book he wished the author would write instead of the one he did.
Drawing parallels from Leto to a benevolent AI qualifies. And I think it makes at least one point that's valuable enough: the long term protection against bad AI, or any kind of bad actor, is to grow ourselves in ways that keep our humanity intact. For what it may seem obvious, it's not something I hear very often.
You're talking about our reality or Dune's? In Dune, arguably Leto succeeded. Siona's children are a lot more human than what might have come from Tleilaxu or IX.
In our reality it's at least useful to be aware of the necessity and the compromise.
Echoing the other commenter, the reviewer didn't understand the book, the series, or the point. It's a good review of a shallow, forced reading of Dune.
Did you somewhere explain what you think the reviewer got wrong? If not it seems like you're kind of doing the thing Scott doesn't like where you just assert that something is obvious without explaining what the obvious point/conclusion is.
It's been a good while since I last read Dune 1-3 and attempted GEoD, but his summaries of the first three books seem reasonable enough to me, and leave me inclined to believe that he's not totally off the rails. If your objection is like the other guy's (JiSK) in that you're just mad the reviewer talked about AI, I'd generally associate myself with Radu Floricica's last reply to him elsewhere in this thread.
My apologies; I didn't have time to write my own fully critique, and I felt like two of the other reviewers captured what I wanted to say. I did end up compulsively leaving that critique in bits and pieces across the comments section anyway.
This is overall a good review, and I really want to like it, but since this is a contest I have a few nitpicks. First, the review sort of wanders. It casually refers to things the reader who hasn’t read the first few books do not know, and while it (sometimes) later explains them, even when this happens the reader is left confused for however long it takes the author to get around to it. Second, the comparison to AI felt a little bit forced, and I don’t think you did the legwork to justify the connection, though maybe my confusion is due to the fact that I still don’t, in fact, really understand the plot. (To be fair it feels like the plot still being unclear may be a function of the book rather than the review.) Finally, the comparison to Yud just felt distracting, off putting, and unnecessary. Yes yes, I know not praising his name constantly makes me a rationalist heretic (or maybe a post-rat) but the review would have had just as much substance and less distraction if you had just said something like “the God-Emperor would be the equivalent of our ai safety hawks”
But with that said, and other than the points I noted, the review was very entertaining and informative, so good job.
Yeah, I agree with all these criticisms. It feels to me like the book review needed to have gone through a few more drafts, including being shown to friends for constructive criticism.
I hope the author gets a bit more practice in, and submits something next year!
Oh man, I read God Emperor of Dune (and the Dune Trilogy) so long ago. It was pretty bad, but still I finished it, so clearly something about it captivated me
Beautiful review! Agree with pretty much all the points. Only other interesting bit to add is a defense of Hwi Noree. I always read her as an object lesson about getting what you want, a bit of a Siren (something created which you specifically irresistible and which mystifies everyone else) that leads to your own undoing because of the unspoken truth that, in the end, you’re a machine that solves problems so if someone comes and gives you what you want so you don’t have problems to solve anymore, you find you don’t really want everything you think you want.
Good review. I get why some people don't like it, but I think God Emperor is a masterpiece. It's my favorite book of the series.
Personally I think Hwi is a fascinating character. She genuinely loves Leto, but she's self aware enough to understand she's a weapon sent to destroy him. Leto knows this too, and Hwi knows he knows it. She trusts him enough to let him let her lead them both to destruction. That destruction turns out to be not just a release from his tortured existence, but the fulfillment of his Golden Path. It's a really poignant love story.
I agree. It's tied for my favorite with the first book. Mostly because of the study of Leto's personality, and trying to figure out how self-aware he is, especially when seeing him through Moneo's eyes. And trying to extrapolate details of the world-building from the vague hints we're given of this time, 3500 years after the first three and 1500 years before the last two, plus the chapter notes that appear to be from some time in the future. And also the glimpses of Anteac. And Nayla's awesome, too. (Although the cliff thing was weird.)
And yeah, Hwi is fascinating. To be kind to her, I'd say she's the epitome of "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.” She's been deliberately designed to have none of the human flaws that Leto finds off-putting. She's got her own set of flaws, of course, but they're the sort that Leto instinctively forgives.
(To be less than kind, I'd say that she's a fantasy come to life, for a person who is Powerful and Capable and is the Only One who can Save the World, and who just wants someone who understands! And she's the fulfillment, someone who instinctively realizes the Awful Rightness of the Plan, who understands that the Sacrifices are Necessary, and approves of them while simultaneously being Properly Horrified by the sacrifices in the way that the protagonist can no longer allow themselves to be. And who quickly realizes the inexorable truth that the best way to help Save the World is to become emotional and sexual support for the Mighty Hero who is Burdened with Great Responsibility.)
Your description of her is making me maybe want to read this book? I quite enjoyed the first Dune novel, but the description of Hwi in the review was giving me major shades of Teela Brown from Ringworld, the "plot" of which I utterly despise.
Hm. Does it help to learn that she was deliberately designed as an "anti-clone" of Malky, the cynical, witty, scheming, former ambassador of Ix, who prior to Hwi was possibly Leto's favorite person ever, for certain definitions of "favorite" which include never trusting anything he said?
Kind of. My main beef with Teela is that she is literally a Walking McGuffin--she has NO personality and was explicitly designed to be the luckiest human ever (which I cast doubt upon if that means she ended up adventuring/having sex with the protagonist, who is such a bland and unlikable human that I don't even remember his name).
Does Ms. Desirable have a personality at all? Then she's doing better than *Ringworld.*
(in all seriousness I do love mirror-versions of characters, either implicit or explicit, so I was already on board with the Idaho clones and this really strong distortion between versions of a character sounds exactly like my cup of tea; I'm wishing I could "like" your comment because that is very helpful info, thank you)
This review is not bad, but there are some mistakes, and the review somehow fails to capture a lot of the weirdness of the book. More importantly, while I respect the attempt, reading GEoD (the title has no "the", this review repeatedly uses TGEoD incorrectly) as an AI analogy is very strange. One of the major points of all the Dune books is an emphasis on human capabilities instead of relying on technology. GEoD is not about "build a friendly AI to protect humanity from malicious AI", it is about "build a friendly and extremely powerful and intelligent human to protect humanity from malicious AI, and anything else that might threaten it". Reading Leto as an AI is the exact opposite of what Frank Herbert intended.
It's also kind of weird that it's omitted in the plot summary that Leto isn't really being overthrown: his plan was always to get murdered by a rebellious Atreides at some point down the line, and he's looking forward to it because if humanity can beat him, he figures they can beat pretty much anything else. He foils several other assassination attempts (no, really, there are at least four others, almost every major faction tries to kill him, it seems like a very regular thing) and if anything he's bored and disappointed with them. He's so excited by a novel attempt by a couple Bene Gesserits that he tries to recruit one of them. He really wants to die, but he's really hard to kill, and he also has a berserk mode because he's partially turning into a sandworm. Did I mention that the book is even weirder than the review explained?
Other weird things: so Hwi Noree is actually the second attempt to build a perfect human to ensnare Leto. The first try was her uncle Malky, who was made to be pure evil, but this trap didn't work because Leto's enemies didn't understand that he's actually a good person at heart (or thinks he is). After Malky failed, he went back and explained this, and they tried a purely good version. Malky shows up towards the end of the novel, doesn't seem that evil, and gets executed by Moneo, wrapping up a minor subplot that doesn't get much attention. Also, a lot of the book is just Leto talking to other characters about politics. Also there's a weird scene where Duncan freaks out when he sees two girl soldiers kissing, and Moneo explains Leto's theory about homosexuality and the military. Also Leto has an all-female army and they have a weird secret kind-of sexual worship ceremony that Duncan gets to attend. This book is really weird!
> as well as having a pretty good ability to predict the future
No, he has near-absolute ability to predict the future. In the first Dune book, Paul has trouble when he encounters situations where there are too many outcomes, like major battles and closely matched knife fights. Leto casually orders his troops into position during an attack on his festival city to perfectly counter every enemy position at once. He complains about how he's already experienced everything that's happened to him, which is why he's almost never surprised. He has a few blind spots, but he literally designed them himself (he breeds Siona and her invisibility genes, and also has a custom "no-sphere" built for him, which is a mechanical room that prescient vision can't see into).
> but also has the combined leadership/political experience of every member of his family line at least as far back as the ancient Greeks.
Well, beyond that, he doesn't have a separate Leto persona like his father Paul did, he subsumed his identity into an amalgamation of all the most successful and ruthless leaders in his family line. And he's at the end of a very long line of aristocrats that goes not only back to Agammemnon, but to Ancient Egypt (in Children of Dune, he talks to his twin sister in ancient Egyptian). He implies it's basically back to human pre-civilization.
> Scattered musings on the least popular Frank Herbert novel
Oh, dear, no. Not even close. It's also nowhere near his worst book. Read the Heaven Makers or The Eyes of Heisenberg.
Not much to add to what you said except that you’re very correct. Having read the book twice before reading this review I was left wondering if I had missed things. Overall this review feels like someone wanted to shoehorn in AI talk to appeal to the ACX audience.
> No, he has near-absolute ability to predict the future.
I think he deliberately overstates this as part of his mystique. Leto is powerful enough not to *need* to lie, but that doesn't mean he's honest. The ban on Mentats and tight restriction of Bene Gesserit and Navigators are tools to limit the scope of his enemies' power, to keep all their actions within his ability to compute and predict. Imposing lower variance allows his tremendous precognition to appear to be absolute.
His entire plan and life hinges on it being true. If his vision isn't absolute, there is no Golden Path, because there is no guarantee of humanity's survival. If his vision is incomplete, then there might be other paths to survival, and becoming the God Emperor would be too monstrous (Paul's vision was incomplete, so he rejected the Golden Path as too monstrous). There's also a ton of textual evidence supporting the degree of Leto's prescient power.
All prescience is incomplete. It's possible that the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach (if that was a thing that was going to exist in Dune 7, which I think it *probably* was) would lack this flaw, but it's part of the basic mechanics of prescience in Dune. Stronger prescients can see more of the decision points and how they connect to the outcomes, but the more other prescients are active and the more chaotic the consequences, the harder it is to distinguish which choices lead to which outcomes.
Leto II makes his prescience extremely powerful by virtue of being a sandworm steeping in his own spice(-precursor/byproduct?), but he doesn't get to remove that fundamental limitation. The Golden Path *heavily overdetermines* the desired outcome, squeezing all the branches of the future together so that even if numerous decisions are made incorrectly, the weight of the other decisions will hold everything back inside the narrow band of the Path.
Paul's vision is no worse than Leto-the-child's vision. He rejects the Golden Path not because he fails to see it clearly, but because he does not have the same code of ethics as his children. This is quite explicit in Children of Dune - Leto and Ghanima directly discuss what they know their father saw and why he reacted differently to it than they do. (Because they have more perspective, having grown up with ancestral memory and peering through all of history; Paul began to gain that perspective only at the same time he gained prescience and massive responsibilities to bear.)
The existence of an unseen path has no need to affect whether the Golden Path is monstrous. That's a fallacy of some kind - it ignores Knightian uncertainty. Say I can see the future and one path includes something like a repeated St. Petersburg Paradox denominated in CEV-utility, where I can't predict the outcome of the coin flips. I also can see some other future where with extremely high probability I pay some massive costs but on net secure a large pile of utility somewhat smaller than the expected value of going for the paradox and winning the expected value. The fact that the St Petersburg option *might* be substantially better than the nearly-sure thing does not have any bearing on whether that option is monstrous or mandatory; obviously if I knew what coin flips were coming I could decide that it was better or worse, but given my Knightian uncertainty, I can only compare the two path's distributions-of-outcomes and take the one that's better **in expectation**. Leto may be in the same position - that there are small, narrow paths through the future that lead to good outcomes, but which he cannot ensure come to pass. The Golden Path, however, we know is broad and secure - if he sets out to follow it, and commits fully, he *will* succeed. Paul, Leto,
and Ghanima all make clear to us that no other path shares *that* property. (It's also possible no other path exists, no matter how narrow; I don't think this is supported by the text, but it is *possible*.)
I agree. It's not that what he sees is incorrect, but that he does not advertise his limitations and cultivates an aura of omniscience. Also, he deliberately does not predict everything so that he can still have surprise in his life, the main example being his own death.
> One of the major points of all the Dune books is an emphasis on human capabilities instead of relying on technology... Reading Leto as an AI is the exact opposite of what Frank Herbert intended.
The thing that makes artificial superintelligences dangerous is not that they're *artificial*, it's that they're *more intelligent than us*. A superintelligence created by genetic engineering or a breeding programme would still be dangerous unless it was aligned with humanity. So I think it's legitimate to view Leto II from the perspective of what we usually call AI risk but which might be better termed superintelligence risk - and it's an interesting scenario from that point of view! Leto suppresses humanity for millennia because of what he sees as our long-term good: is he aligned with humanity, or unaligned?
Similar to another comment that I made elsewhere in the thread:
This is an intellectually dicey equation. Superintelligence *may* be dangerous in any form, but people around here fund specific institutions (MIRI, FHI, etc) that use specific techniques (alignment in programming) to ward against a specific threat (programmed, emergent machine intelligence), and nothing about the *general* potential danger of superintelligences helps to support the case that this specific one is worthy of attention and funding.
Basically the review is saying "look, a famous person once pointed out that there is danger from the ocean! This is just like our beloved 'kill the sharks before they kill us' project."
To which, no. That is a sneaky or very misguided argument. There is danger from the ocean. You haven't convinced me we have to kill the sharks.
It describes a potential alignment failure that I have not seen described before: the superintelligence acts as a cruel dictator for millennia, believing it is acting for the long-term benefit of humanity. Would we consider such a superintelligence friendly? It's something to think about as we define what it even means to align a superintelligence. That may not have been what Herbert wanted to focus on, but it's still an interesting question prompted by the book.
I will adjust to the idea that you're new to thinking about the topic (ie, I will be nicer) if you adjust to the idea that you're new to thinking about the topic (ie, be humbler and less certain of your position).
This is a mature form of an old idea, much older than Herbert, and even Herbert's version has been around for 40 years, fully predating the *entire* AI-risk movement by decades.
I am 39 years old. I first read this book 20 years ago. *I* am still relatively young and new compared to older people who've been thinking about this topic for much of their lives.
I want you to understand that there has been a tribe of AI researchers, for decades and decades, who did detailed work in the space, and were fully on board with the idea that *eventually* there will be true artificial intelligence. They had nuanced philosophical ideas about what that meant (and they usually didn't mean "beat AlphaGo and simulate the visual cortex"). They read numerous books like this one, although I admit this is best in class and it's hard to find as good a match. But. But. These people were not convinced that AI was going to kill us, or that we could or should work on programmatically aligning it to our values. They had legitimate concerns, some of which are already bearing out in the real world, like technical unemployment and bias and new moral questions. They did not believe in or fear Roko's basilisk or the paperclip maximizer.
I am one of those people, even though I'm only 39, even though I'm only a small fry in the applied ML space.
I want you to understand, as someone who is relatively new to thinking about the topic, that you might not have thought it through. That you could be wrong. That Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky are not authorities or particularly convincing and well regarded outside this subculture.
Alignment is an interesting and *potentially* significant problem. It's not a proven critical issue and it shouldn't be a religion.
I'm slightly older than you, I've been aware of AI risk as an issue for about fifteen years, I've worked on ML-based systems for nearly that long, though I'm painfully aware how much I don't know on the technical side (neural nets were out of fashion when I got into the field). I first read Dune thirty years ago, but never got around to the sequels, though I've seen the SyFy adaptation. I'm aware there are a lot of people working in AI who don't take superintelligence risk seriously, and I'm aware that there are whole teams working on immediately pressing but lower-downside issues like bias. However, I don't know what you're referring to by "a tribe of AI researchers... were fully on board with the idea that *eventually* there will be true artificial intelligence. They had nuanced philosophical ideas about what that meant", and I'd very much like to. Obviously there's a rich science fiction literature about the question, but that's not the same thing. Can you give me some links?
The last section of Russell and Norvig's seminal "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" has a very good discussion of the topic (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/).
Geoffrey Jefferson's "The Mind of Mechanical Man" has a great pull quote: "not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain"
I don't have a book for it, but it's useful to read some cognitive science and developmental psychology from the perspective of a parent raising a child, and think about how that could be the same or different for AI. My skeptical view of GAI and AI-risk is predominantly formed by my sense of the necessity and effect of interactive training on intelligence; I simply don't believe it's very likely that anything we would call intelligent will come about without huge amounts of parenting, and this changes my view of the danger and flavor of the alignment problem. I am not aligned with my daughter, but because of me, she's not a sociopath.
Finally, as you may have seen me link elsewhere in the comments, there's regular old programmer layman smart guy Maciej Ceglowski's excellent "Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People", a response to Bostrom's book from both the inside and outside. It's funny, it's well argued, it's wonderful (Essay at https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm, Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErHiET5YPw).
Yeah, AI with an antihuman agenda was practically a cliche in sci-fi by 1981. Usually more interested in enslaving humanity than wiping us out, but for the same reasons.
I think you've misunderstood not only this book but all of its sequels. (Not counting the stupid son's bullshit, which you have correctly ignored as utterly worthless, and in fact appear not to have ignored quite as totally as you ought to have. It's the stupid son, not Frank Herbert, who thinks about AI.)
Leto's fear is not of AI but of stagnation. People claim to want peace and stability - Herbert and Leto think that this wish, if granted, would be catastrophic. The Golden Path consists of demonstrating, to all of humanity, what peace and stability really look like, convincing them in the only way that really works that they Do Not want that.
Leto is not limiting the ability of his society to produce AI. In fact, he quite deliberately allows Ix to develop far more than it did in the preceding era. He quietly but unmistakably *encourages* the development of the no-chamber into the no-ship and the rediscovery of the (spice-free) mechanical Navigator, which can plot courses between the stars.
He restricts computers, but that's not actually important. Everyone before him, for thousands of years, restricted computers **much more** than he did What he does do that's new, on the other hand, is restrict computer-analogues. The Pre-Atreides empire, the CHOAM era, had a wide variety of nontechnological substitutes for the things that computers would otherwise do. Guild Navigators to plot courses between stars. Bene Gesserit as repositories of knowledge (among other things). Suk Doctors to serve as perfectly neutral providers of medical services (this didn't work very well, but it was also less necessary than the others). And, crucially, Mentats to do rapid calculations. Leto restricted all of these things tightly and banned Mentats entirely; he allowed some violations to pass unprosecuted, but very few.
If he doesn't fear AI, why does he restrict computer-like things? Because it makes the Golden Path easier. Even with nigh-omniscience, a stranglehold on the unobtainium, and thousands of years, controlling everything that happens to ensure you hit a very narrow target is not easy. (Here you can get some of your AI Alignment Problem parallels back.) By massively restricting the capabilities of even the most powerful factions in Leto's Empire, he keeps the capabilities of the opposition within his ability to compute. He also, like he strangles movement to create a lasting urge to move, strangles power to create a lasting urge to become powerful.
These are two sides of the same thing. The instinct Leto II wants to instill in the human race is, quite simply, "Become Ungovernable".
Which he does, by **governing the shit** out of humanity.
While Leto II is mostly powerful enough to dispense with lies, the best way to read God-Emperor of Dune is not to listen to his words, but to look at the end result and assume that he succeeded. While he's characteristically cryptic, the hints he gives over the course of the book, and Children of Dune before it, point squarely toward the result being a win. He wanted humanity to spread beyond the power of any tyrant to lock them into stagnation or decline, and ensured this by becoming the best tyrant possible.
Crucially, Leto II's death is a covert *assisted suicide*. He is surprised by the timing, because he did not see Hwi coming, but *he had the power to escape the assassination* and chose not to use it. For the maximum effect on the Scattering, he had to be killed, and so his death is an attack. But it is an attack he could defend against, did he so choose. He does not so choose; anti-prescience is ready within one generation, and so he lets the reins of power drop, secure in the knowledge that he has finished the millennia of suffering that he, and Paul before him, saw laid out before them, and that he has successfully made humanity unbreakable.
The story of the last two books, and the probable direction the final book was headed before the stupid son got his filthy mitts on it, was the consequences of that. Leto II made humanity ungovernable, but that didn't make it impossible to subtly control. The Honored Matres are ungovernability raised to a religion, and the two old gardeners are an outside context problem that cannot be coordinated against.
I believe the arc of the last no-ship, the collection of misfit gholas we meet in Chapterhouse: Dune, was to establish a microcosm of humanity, a collection of distinguished minds, who could then debate and settle on a course that a final Kwisatz Haderach could impose, exerting a final surge of superior prescience that allowed a deterministic Good Future that he and he alone could perceive, overwhelming everything else. (So this gets a little more AI Alignment into it as well. But without the AI.) I have ambitions to write this, because it's not like I can do worse than the "official" sequels.
Yup. I don't think there's anything left to write, though. The end of Chapterhouse is the culmination of Leto's Golden Path. It's not a cliffhanger at all. There's never been any doubt in my mind Frank Herbert meant to end the story there.
Disagree - there's a theme developing in Heretics and Chapterhouse, about identity, possibly agency, without Abomination. (See also: The Dosadi Experiment).
The Tuek Face Dancer in Heretics assumes Tuek's personality. He's beyond the Tleilaxu Master Waff's control. Odrade in Chapterhouse decides not to lose Clairby's abilities and orders him turned into a cyborg. Then there's Daniel and Marty. And Murbella. And Sheena, who crafted a sculpture that gave Odrade the willies.
And Idaho, who seems to have genetic memories that he shouldn't, and he's been hiding the existence of those memories from Odrade and the rest.
He left two floppy disks full of notes - one with plans for the next book or two, the other about the setting - which there is still some hope that we will someday get to see, despite his son's sabotage. I think there's a real answer to what Daniel and Marty were and something was coming about the confrontation with Final Idaho and the no-ship alliance. A broader philosophical point, probably about a *positive* goal to supplement or supercede the anti-stagnation goal of the Golden Path. That was the style of Dune, increasingly as the series went on. Sort of like Ender's Game.
Oh, I'd assumed the Dune 7 notes were a rumor but looks like they do exist. Thanks for correcting me. Yeah, it would be amazing to get a look at those.
I'm still completely satisfied with the ending we got in Chapterhouse.
Narratively they are the Greater Scope Villain that Duncan narrowly escapes. It affirms that it was wise and necessary to Scatter as they did, with no way home and no way for anyone to follow them.
The last chapter tells us everything we need to know about Daniel & Marty, and strongly suggests that Duncan et al have passed permanently beyond their reach. What's left to tell?
Also, a note on Butlerism. The Butlerian Jihad was not about AI, according to the references we have and the Dune Encyclopedia, which had Frank Herbert's permission, attention, support, and probable pseudonymous participation. It was much more about alienation; Marx's alienation of labor, a spiritual alienation from the timeless essence of what it means to be human, and other variations on that theme. The opponents were not artificial intelligences but cyborgs and people who made heavy *use* of computers; users and proponents cybernetics in the original sense of studying feedback loops.
Frank Herbert was uninterested in artificial intelligence, and it's not clear if there was ever a true AI in the entire timeline of Dune from prehistory through the end of the story, though uploads definitely existed. It's the stupid son who put AI into Dune.
If he could have stopped the assassination attempt and didn't, doesn't he run the risk that the next time a less benevolent God Emperor might prevent any assassination attempts so that humanity remains under its control?
This is precisely the problem his golden path was meant to solve. When we return to the universe in the next book, sects of humanity from different galaxies (perhaps different universes/realities) are in conflict over the "prime" human dynasty. It is implied that Leto's death and the subsequent shattering of civilization resulted in such a massive and all-encompassing migration that it may be impossible ever to reunite the entirety of humanity.
I have some dumb questions that are probably going to annoy the hell out of the people here who know Dune backward and forward. But one of the virtues of this review was that it made the themes comprehensible and compelling to somebody who doesn't really know the Dune mythos at all. (I saw the David Lynch film many years ago, but that's it.) So humor me, if you will.
1) Remind me what's the connection between the sandworms and the spice? The sandworms more or less poop out spice, or something like that?
2) If people want spice, and sandworms make spice, but sandworms are also a pain for people to live around, why does anybody need or want to live on the sandworm planet? Why not just leave the planet to the sandworms, let them multiply and make spice, and do whatever you need to do to harvest the spice without establishing a permanent human settlement? Why are the battles over territorial control of the sandworm planet, rather than over some strategic chokepoint that controls access to it?
3) Is Leto a god? Is "god-emperor" just a title, in the same way that centuries of rulers in the Islamic world styled themselves as insan-i-kamil (the perfected person)? Or is the idea that he's actually a god who also happens to be an emperor?
> Remind me what's the connection between the sandworms and the spice? The sandworms more or less poop out spice, or something like that?
Close enough. The spice is a byproduct of the sandworm life cycle.
> If people want spice, and sandworms make spice, but sandworms are also a pain for people to live around, why does anybody need or want to live on the sandworm planet? Why not just leave the planet to the sandworms, let them multiply and make spice, and do whatever you need to do to harvest the spice without establishing a permanent human settlement? Why are the battles over territorial control of the sandworm planet, rather than over some strategic chokepoint that controls access to it?
For one thing, space travel is point-to-point through space folding, there aren't strategic choke points. For another, harvesting spice is an industrial process that is labor-intensive, having a permanent human civilization on the planet is pretty much a hard requirement. Remember, no computers or robots in the Dune universe, so no remote mining operations with drones or whatever.
> Is Leto a god? Is "god-emperor" just a title, in the same way that centuries of rulers in the Islamic world styled themselves as insan-i-kamil (the perfected person)? Or is the idea that he's actually a god who also happens to be an emperor?
He is worshipped as a god by his very many followers (most of the population of humanity). Is he actually a god? Well he's a superhuman hive mind of all his ancestors, can see the future, is personally a supercomputer, has the ability to model human minds with such accuracy that he can say words in certain tones that make you do whatever he says, and he's also a giant worm who is nearly unkillable. Is he a god? Not exactly, but you wouldn't fault someone for making that mistake.
If I can sneak in one more question, which I probably should've asked to begin with. Is whether Leto is really a god something that's raised thematically as an issue in the novel itself? Or is Herbert not that interested in exploring that question, and it's just you and me looking at Leto and trying to decide whether he strikes us as god-like or not?
In that ultimate sense, no - like he's vulnerable to certain kinds of attack, he's really bored after 4000 short years. The book isn't really unclear about the fact that he's just a very long lived, very durable worm-man hybrid who also happens to be psychic. If anything it's more unclear if gods exist in the ultimate, absolute sense at all.
Yeah, the problematic role of religion is quite a big theme in the series. In the first book, the reason Paul Atreides (Leto's father) is able to win the war on Dune is because the Bene Gesserit started cynically using religious memes to infect populations with centuries before. When Paul arrives, the Fremen who live in the Dune desert were long ago implanted with a saviour religion that makes them see Paul as essentially the second coming. (I'm thinking Herbert may have been influenced by the story of how Cortez was perceived as a god by the Inca, though I don't know how true that story is.) Paul's problem is that the religious fervour that he rides to the emperorship is too strong, and will inevitably result in a massive orgy of violence. (I think Herbert uses the word jihad.)
In God Emperor, Leto recognises the same problem, and has deliberately cultivated an army of women, because he believes that their religious belief in him as a god will not lead to the same violent outcome.
I think Herbert wasn't very interested in the question of whether Leto is a god (he defines Leto very clearly in his own terms). But he is very interested in the power of religion as a social force.
They also did the next best thing to harvesting the spice from a safe distance without living in Sandworm Country. The Great House presence on Arrakis pre-Muad'dib was mostly limited to a settled region near the North Pole which had a somewhat less hostile climate than most of the rest of the planet and was protected from sandworms by a ring of elevated rocky terrain called the "shield wall". The spice-collection operations were based out of here, using giant cargo aircraft (carryalls) to deliver mobile spice-harvesting equipment and crews whenever a worthwhile deposit was found, then pick everything up and skedaddle when a sandworm inevitably turned up.
The people closest to living in sandworm country were the Fremen, who lived in scattered communities in the deep desert and had various cultural adaptation to both the ridiculously harsh climate and the proximity sandworms. Even the Fremen mostly lived and worked in underground communities dug into terrain that was too rocky for sandworms, although the Fremen did frequently venture out into the open desert for various reasons including spice collection for personal use and for sale to smugglers. If the origin of the Fremen is every explored in detail, I missed it, but as the series opens they seem to be of the opinion that the sandworms are easier to live with than the Harkonnens.
It's been a long time, but I think I remember that the Fremen were forced to move from one planet to another, several times, before ending up on Arrakis. So I suppose they fled into the desert to avoid whoever it was who kept doing this to them. I also remember them resenting being denied the Hajj, so I guess they were Muslim at some point.
They were described as "Zensunni", which might be one of the "Buddislamic variants" described in the appendices. There's apparently been a lot of religious mixing in the 20,000ish years between now and then. Among other things, while various Arabic words have been roughly preserved, the meaning has often changed, so "hajj" to the Fremen appears to mean something slightly different than it does to people of early-21st-century Earth. In context, it appears to be something like "the sacred right to travel wherever God commands you to travel", though that's just my interpretation.
Regarding 2, another factor is that the Spacing Guild has a trade monopoly on space travel. The Great Houses are restricted to surface-to-orbit ships, which dock with space-only Guild transports in order to travel to other star systems.
The Guild is referred to several times as a "parasite", and one of the things it does to ensure the survival of its host organism (galactic civilization) is to charge exorbitant prices for military transport. Thus, most (all?) warfare between Great Houses is classified as a "War of Assassins", which seems to include assassination, sabotage, duels, a formal definition of "traitor", and other stuff like that. Military action tends to be limited to small-scale raids by elite troops, because the Guild charges too much for anything bigger.
Also, the Guild uses spice for safe interstellar travel, and its use is addictive, so they are very much interested in being the one and only chokepoint that controls access to the spice.
Right. The Guild absolutely need spice, and conveniently they absolutely control access to Arrakis. They *also* need someone to do the dangerous, messy, industrial work of actually harvesting and refining spice, which isn't a good match for their normal skillset. But they don't want to be dependent on anyone else.
So they have three redundant pipelines of spice up from Arrakis. First, CHOAM and whichever Great House has the official contract to harvest spice. Second, the essentially mercenary spice smugglers that Gurney Halleck hooked up with for a while, and that everybody knows about but nobody ever seems to get around to completely suppressing. And third, the Fremen themselves, who pay a regular bribe in spice to the Guild in order to protect their privacy so nobody knows there are millions of them.
As Eric Rall notes, all of this harvesting is done by people who live in the rocky, marginally habitable, not-worm-infested parts of Arrakis and commute to the desert for work. If you were really fanatical about "Arrakis sucks, nobody should live there", I suppose you could have them live in orbital habitats and commute to the surface in shuttles. But space is an even harsher environment than Arrakis, and space shuttles are probably more expensive to operate than ornithopters, so that would be inefficient.
It would also be harder to do in a way that allows for a triple-redundant supply of spice to the Guild, without making it too obvious that the Guild is putting its thumb on the scales.
All these responses are much appreciated; I feel like this is giving me a really good sense of some of the texture of Herbert's worldbuilding. And everybody's been nice enough not to say "why don't you just read the damn book for yourself?"
But I also feel like now I have this higher-order question that I'm not sure even reading the books would answer. Why is Dune set in space? It seems like Herbert decided to give Dune an interstellar setting, then devised this elaborate set of stipulations so as to make anything space-related a null factor in the story.
Anything about space as a strategic environment, or the Roddenberrian sense of openness to uncharted, undiscovered worlds, is preempted by the device of the Spacing Guild. Then again, one planet is of such overriding importance that it's fine for pretty much all the action to take place there anyway. There are (the equivalent of) Bedouins, which I guess you can come up with a space-based explanation for, but definitely makes *more* sense you imagine humans expanding over that planet only, with non-state groups getting forced onto more and more marginal lands.
Also the Bedouins can, properly led, become a formidable military force, because the technologies we'd associate with the capacity for spaceflight have themselves been stipulated away in one way or another. No computers, no ICBMs, and for some complicated reason I've now forgotten everybody fights with swords. The political system seems essentially medieval; religion is, IIRC, a series of syncretic mashups of our familiar historical world religions.
So, if you're Herbert writing on a blank slate, you could just, like, not set the story in space. Or you could give it an interstellar setting, then build in all these epicycles so that everything playing out as if society were at the organizational and technological level of Eurasia circa 1100 makes internally consistent sense. And the way Herbert goes about doing that is inventive and often impressive in its own right.
The decision itself just feels undermotivated. Herbert doesn't seem to particularly like space. He goes out of his way to tamp down the impulse to find anything fun and cool about it. Uniquely among writers of his time, he imagined future spaceflight on ballistic principles not as an extension *beyond* the race to the Moon, but instead as the lame cuck surface-to-orbit stuff we actually got. He does have one alien species, but it seems like the sandworms play roughly the same structural role that dragons do in a lot of medieval-themed fantasy, and Game of Thrones didn't have to be set in space just to get one made-up species into it.
They use knives because they have tech that stops guns. But why don't they use swords? And why don't they wear knife-proof armor in addition to their anti-gun "shields"?
They do use swords. Rapiers, if I remember correctly the Paul-and-Gurney scene from the first book. Also, poisoned blades are common, as well as weapons that fire slow-moving projectiles (also poisoned).
My explanation for their not using armor is that *any* armor slows you down and drains stamina like you wouldn't believe. That's been my experience from doing HEMA (medieval fencing) - fighting in armor sucks, even it's just padded cotton.
So my take is that Dune's "shields and cloth" approach is the maximum of protection with the minimum of encumbrance, a compromise arrived at after millennia of small-scale warfare.
I do wish Herbert would have just ignored lasers altogether, the whole laser-on-shield explosion thing does just about nothing narratively. Just let lasers go through shields like butter, but impractical as weapons (power, cooling, hard to manufacture etc).
For all of its drawbacks, armor was near-universal before guns made it useless. And the Dune setting should have high-tech materials that reduce the drawbacks. Gurney Halleck, etc., are knights whose foes do not use guns, so they should be wearing heavy armor in battle. And maybe some sort of armor every day given their culture's constant backstabbing and paranoia.
But they do wear armor every day - the shields belts are always on them, except maybe in bed. Anything material would just add too little protection to matter, while imposing a non-negligible cost.
Once again, I think you don't realize just how close to "perfect armor" those shields are. Super light, near-zero time to put it on/take it off, definitely stops *anything* moving fast leaving you guaranteed time to react, no repeat no weakpoints, full visibility (ever tried sparring with a fencing mask on?)
>The Dune setting should have high-tech materials
You mean except the energy shields? Anyway, feel free to write your own universe, or maybe some Dune fanfic, and be assured that I at least will definitely give it a read.
The shield-and-cloth thing bothered me as well, but your argument about encumbrance is an intriguing justification. I was about to counter it with the standard argument that the encumbrance of armor is exaggerated in popular imagination (*), but then I reread your comment more closely and it registered that you were speaking from personal HEMA experience and probably know quite a bit more about the matter than I do, the maximum of my fighting-in-armor experience is wearing a cheap aluminum chainmail hauberk while fighting in boffer LARPs.
(*) This is especially the case for full plate. One big source of misunderstanding about its encumbrance is confusion between jousting armor and combat armor, with the former being far heavier and more restrictive of mobility. Another is accounts of Henry VIII needing to be lifted onto his horse with winches and pulleys during the 1544 Siege of Boulogne, which sometimes gets exaggerated and overgeneralized to apply to all armored knights, while the actual problem was that this was late in King Henry's life when he had gotten extremely fat (to the point where a Spanish diplomat reported that three large men could fit in Henry's doublet) and had a chronic abscess on one of his legs from an old jousting injury.
It'd be an interesting intellectual exercise to come up with armor design that would supplement the protection of Dune's shields with a minimum of encumbrance, though. My first idea for low-hanging fruit would be a shirt similar in construction to modern cut-resistant gloves (i.e. knitted synthetic fiber with a high strength against cutting, such as kevlar, dyneema, or HPPE), which probably wouldn't provide meaningful protection against the kinds of full-force sword blows that historical battlefield armor protects against, but would provide at least partial protection against the precise and relatively-slow strikes that we see Paul being trained to deliver (and guard against) for the purposes of getting through shields. I've worked in level A5 (medium duty) cut-resistant kitchen gloves and didn't find them significantly encumbering.
Re: armor design--I do modern fencing (foil & saber) and I think you're on the right track there. Modern fencing gear is designed to be resistant to at least 800N (if not 1200N) of force and covers pretty much all the vital points. Making similarly-shaped garments out of a material with higher cut resistance should not substantially increase the weight and should retain a lot of mobility.
I don't know I also have done HEMA, and I would say exactly the reverse about armor. It is wildly less restricting and encumbering than you would think. Kind of hot, but other than that no big deal. But I am a hockey player, so maybe that is why, used to gear.
It definitely encumbers you *some*, but I would put it in the single digits percent, while increasing your survivability substantially.
That isn't even getting into the issue of how it tilts the offense/defense balance because even pretty minimal armor suddenly takes large areas of targets out of play for your enemy and reduces the need to parry everything.
Sure, the fitter the better. The point is that you're giving up valuable speed and stamina, for an advantage in protection that isn't that valuable, since the shield already protects you very effectively.
Herbert says the balance ended up at shields and underwear, and I don't think it's absurd.
I don't think there's anything that actually suggests they DON'T wear armour in context-appropriate situations - I don't believe the actual equipment of the soldiers is ever described in that much detail (and armored ones certainly exist), and there's no reason to think that a lot of the clothing they wear isn't armored to some extent. The weapons are just very good at cutting through it.
I think his Galactic Empire is a dystopia, and part of what the first book does is show how it operates and hint at how it got that way. The feudal social structure is explicitly described as "a place for every man, and every man in his place". And then the books gradually disrupt the dystopia, until the 5th book 5000 years later, when the old Galactic Empire is just a rump state of historical interest, and the vast majority of humanity is in the "Scattering", having sought out strange new worlds with new life forms, and having built many new civilizations (and thus having developed many interesting new dysfunctions of their own). (And then by the 6th book, the planet Dune has been nuked to a lifeless crisp.)
Also, my understanding is that the original book "Dune" started as ecological musings, spurred by some ecological work he was doing for the State of California. So to wildly speculate, it started with the idea of a planet that had been transformed into desert by the introduction of an alien form of life. Then add people who learned to survive, and extrapolate what they'd be like. And then those people were given a plan on how to transform their planet into a garden paradise, heightening an already-artificially-enhanced religious fervor. And then a Messiah got dropped onto them. Overall, I think "Dune" is more of an anthropological study than pretty much any sci-fi I've read, outside of Le Guin. Less action, more appendices. ;-)
Also worth noting is that the Great Houses do all have nuclear weapons, referred to as their "family atomics". They tend to be hidden, and some are smuggled onto other worlds, and there's a delicate balance of power among the Great Houses, and between them collectively and the Emperor (who has more and better ground troops). The "Great Convention", their Geneva Protocol equivalent, reads in part, "Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration."
I'd like to take issue with the following point: "Therein lies the secondary risk of AI; by creating an AI that coddles us, we run the risk of never advancing as a race again. As Dune points out, soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce."
This premise is often trotted out, and I don't think it's properly examined.
A) It's very hard to hold something as fluid as a race of intelligent people in stasis. I ask for proof that the human ambition for exploration, discovery and pushing boundaries can be quashed by being coddled. It seems more likely that coddling includes facilitating self-discovery and improvement than the alternative.
B) What's the inherent good in advancing? If you're imposing a harsh environment, you're hurting people. Why? If it is to enable a better future where people suffer less, then when you eventually reach that future you can go soft, right?
Finally, creating an AI that strives to "[identify] what it is that makes humans human and [amplify] those traits in a positive direction" seems like it's more likely to 'lock in' current conceptions of humanity and goodness than anything else. What ultimately needs to advance is not just humanity, but the conception of what humanity is. If anything, an AI that facilitates people in preference-driven self-modification seems better.
I guess that is (for a big part) the question the DUNE-series is exploring (Harald Martenstein: I write a novel when the ideas become too big to explore in a column or short-story"). As a 17-year-old reader I felt more and more bored with Dune as the understanding grew: There is no final aim/meaning and there can not be. - As Steven Pinker put it: You can always ask "Why?"/"And what's the meaning of that?!" after each "ultimate aim"/"final meaning". - Thus as there can not be "a biggest number", there can not be a "final meaning". (Did he got that from his wife?) -
First book is a great paperback-novel, "full of sound and fury". The last two books - after GEoD - I could not even finish half-way ("a tale told by an idiot?"), though I was enjoying the encyclopedia.
OTOH: Herbert clearly disdains the "museum-fremen" - and he made the reader admire the "harsh" fremen of the desert in book 1. But, as you said, the results of their "victory", kinda devalue their struggle, "signifying nothing". Or do they? - Btw: Rambo III got kinda meaningful with decades passing by.
> *If you're imposing a harsh environment, you're hurting people. Why? If it is to enable a better future where people suffer less, then when you eventually reach that future you can go soft, right?*
No. Within the context of the novel, Leto's goal isn't to *enable* a future where "people suffer less", but to *prevent* a future where the entirety of humanity gets wiped out and goes extinct.
I'm not arguing with the AI risk element in the context of the novel. I'm arguing with the secondary goal of the AI as laid out by the reviewer. He seems to be arguing that any benevolent AI we make should impose a harsh environment to foster humanity in a Leto-esque fashion, and it's that second part I disagree with.
Humans have pets which are coddled. These pets don't do much advancing. And if humanity goes extinct, these pets are more likely to do so as well than animals which remained wild. You could argue that humans themselves were domesticated, but recall Scott's review from years ago of Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success"*. There was constant competition between groups leading to cultural selection.
Humans have some significant innate differences from animals that make the analogy between them fairly useless, so far as this argument goes. It seems you're defining 'advancement' as 'maintaining a competitive advantage'. I think we, with our globalized society, can come up with a better definition centered around human flourishing, which doesn't require constant evolutionary pressure to achieve. Especially if we're giving that definition to a benevolent AI.
I used the term "advancing" because you did above, I did not "define" it. But I was implicitly relying on the idea that humans have themselves "advanced" over time from our shared ancestors with other species.
"Flourishing" sounds vague and not very well defined. I suppose the simplest definition would be in terms of having a large/expanding population, in which case the animals domesticated by humans have generally flourished (horses took a big hit after being displaced by machines, but still aren't at risk of extinctions), while numerous other species have not. But if humans go extinct, and then our domesticated animals do as well (I think pigs might still have good odds, they go feral easily), that would clearly not be "flourishing".
Like I said, I used that word because the person I was responding to did. In an abstract sense we could describe all species as "advancing" over time in an evolutionary state space of many dimensions.
I also object to the excerpt you quoted. First, one should distinguish cultural, technological and genetic 'advancement', which take place on very different time scales and are subject to different forces.
The part of coddling sounds to me like meme "bad times create hard men", which celebrates harsh living conditions as a prerequisite to prosperity. I would argue that mostly, the opposite is true. People with little slack [0] seldom accomplish much beyond survival, while some people with enough slack accomplish much. I think that it would be fair to describe Shakespeare as being "cuddled" by the English nobility. About almost all of our advantages in science and technology are made by people who do not have to worry where their next meal comes from. Even for military matters, the idea of harsh living conditions producing the best fighters has be thoroughly been debunked. [1]
Genetically speaking, too much slack might indeed lead to a higher prevalence of genetic illnesses, I expect that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle selects against bad eyesight in a way that our lifestyle does not. The compassionate answer to that dilemma is not to kill people or have them fend for their survival, but to use CRISPR to fix the next generation.
Of course, the spectrum between a cruel jailer AI and a benevolent overlord AI is continuous: every such system would have to constrain competing AIs at the very least to be stable. Providing any humans with anything they request (like plutonium or fentanyl ) is also not likely to optimize human flourishing. Putting humans into happy VR sims is debatable. Any sufficiently advanced nanny-state is indistinguishable from totalitarism.
I share your skepticism about "bad times create hard men", but it's a major theme of the Dune series. The Emperor in the first novel recruits his best troops from a horrible prison planet. The Fremen turn out to be even better fighters, even though they're not even full-time soldiers, because their planet is even worse.
The theme also appears in The Dosadi Experiment by the same author.
Although I think I'd disagree with him on the development paths of the Spanish/Portugese empires vs the more fragmented German states (yes, both rank above Germany in his linked graph on urbanization, but so does similarly fragmented Italy).
Yes, I thought of that as well when I browsed through the SSC post I linked. In reality, military technology is not developed at leisure by a society with no external threats and lot's of slack, like Scott's Civilization Aztec. The fixed tech tree of Civ, where the discovery of tech is totally divorced from using related tech, so that a land-locked nation could discover ships of the line or an insular nation could develop musketeers without ever being in a conflict is clearly not realistic. EU does try to be more reasonable there (IIRC, you get military points/naval points from fighting battles).
In reality, one probably needs the right mixture of certain types of slack plus other resources.
The acoup series is excellent, but proves a slightly different point than "harsh living conditions don't produce the best fighters". Instead Bret Devereaux shows that societies with harsh living conditions usually lose wars against societies with soft living conditions, principally because the society with soft living conditions has an enormous economic advantage (that's how they got to have a soft living) and being able to heavily equip, train full time, and supply an army is a massive advantage. He also shows that countries that espouse badassery (e.g. the Spartans, Nazi Germany - an example that did have a capable economy) are terrible at diplomacy, to the extent that what starts as a winnable war splurges into a contest against 3/4rds of the world.
This doesn't directly challenge the approach of e.g. the British Empire recruiting many of its best regiments from the poorer Scottish, Irish or Gurkha backgrounds. Bret Devereaux is more interested in achieving strategic objectives than he is in raising super soldiers (though at minimum we can say that the soft society bloke in heavy armour, with years of focused training, can usually beat quite a few fierce hunters with sharpened toothpicks).
> This doesn't directly challenge the approach of e.g. the British Empire recruiting many of its best regiments from the poorer Scottish, Irish or Gurkha backgrounds.
You need to pay your soldiers enough that they want to be soldiers instead of whatever else they might be doing. This is easier if you're recruiting the poor.
The Spartans did manage to beat the Athenians in the ancient Greek version of a war that kept absorbing more belligerents. So the terrible Athenian decision to invade Sicily/Syracuse is now the blunder remembered.
>the soft society bloke in heavy armour, with years of focused training, can usually beat quite a few fierce hunters with sharpened toothpicks
Sure, but only because the "softie" was hardened (and taught discipline and cohesion) by years of harsh training, essentially imitating the "barbarians'" life. That's the best argument in favor of the "hard times" meme - to make strong men, create a harsh microcosm, no other way will do.
Bret Devereaux hates the idea, though. So there's that.
Then why aren't we all speaking Mongol (and calling the Mongols barbarians is somewhat debatable in any case)? Why is North America a going concern of majority-English-speakers? It's not just numbers.
Devereaux also rather thoroughly takes apart the idea that the Spartans were particularly better at fighting than other Ancient Greeks.
There's also the bit where the Ancient Romans cheerfully curb-stomped plenty of opponents using militia armies. Ditto the Ancient Greeks, for that matter.
Same reason we're not all speaking Latin. It's *complicated* and definitely not determined by who had the best fighters 1v1.
> Devereaux also rather thoroughly takes apart the idea that the Spartans were particularly better at fighting than other Ancient Greeks
Rather at diplomacy and strategy. See previous sentence.
>the Ancient Romans cheerfully curb-stomped plenty of opponents using militia armies
You mean like when the Gauls sacked Rome? The Romans' armies became more effective as they became more professional, precisely in order to defeat "the barbarians". The guys who pacified the West, having defeated Carthage and Seleucia, they were pros, not seasonal militia.
And the way they turned citizens into effective soldiers, was by harsh training. qed
...Virtually nothing is ever determined by who has the best fighters 1v1.
The Spartans also were godawful at diplomacy and pretty mediocre at strategy too, which he also deals with.
The guys who defeated Carthage, however, were NOT professionals. They were levied from the propertied citizen body.
And if harsh training suffices to fix the inadequacies of civilized life when facing barbarians, it'd seem to make more sense to be soft while we can, being harsh only when we need to be.
There's more than one way to build cohesion. If I were looking to hire an artillerist, I'd strongly prefer a knack for trigonometry over, say, the ability to slay a wild boar barehanded. Savage glory isn't where you find the best factory workers and maintenance technicians, and when you've got those, one "I dunno, I just work here" chump sitting in a well-supplied machine gun nest can almost casually wipe out several hundred brave, hardened heroes who forgot to bring armor support.
> There's more than one way to build cohesion. If I were looking to hire an artillerist, I'd strongly prefer a knack for trigonometry over, say, the ability to slay a wild boar barehanded
Neither of those is what "cohesion" means. Devereux does a good job explaining the concept, briefly it's about soldiers' willingness to stand together and fight instead of going every man for himself.
> one "I dunno, I just work here" chump sitting in a well-supplied machine gun nest can almost casually wipe out several hundred
I really don't think you're right here. Read up some WW1 history, it's way, way more complicated than that. Peace!
Yes, I've read it, and I apologize for oversimplifying and explaining poorly. Perhaps you should re-read that series on the battle of Helm's Deep, where he discusses how the uruk-hai have 'barbarically harsh' training and crap cohesion, while the bulk of Rohan's force is civilians with barely any training and yet excellent cohesion.
Decent review, and yes, God Emperor is definitely worth reading. It's gotta be the second best in the series.
But I want to strongly disagree with something that seems to be assumed in passing in both this review and the Dune books:
"success can make you soft," "soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce"
This is a classic tough guy trope. It sounds like wisdom. But I'm pretty sure it's complete nonsense. If the research shows us anything, it's that winners tend to win more. And common sense should tell us that we live in a much softer environment than any of our historical and prehistorical forebears, and yet we do much tougher things than they ever did (like live to 90, for example).
In fact, this kind of claim is often used to conflate at least three different things, and each one would need to be separately teased out and researched.
(1) Do individual people tend to become weaker given success/a soft environment? This is a question about human psychology. My feeling is that the answer is unambiguously no, but there's always room for argument.
(2) Do human cultures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? This is a question about cultural evolution, which is highly underspecified. I'm not sure I even know what a weak or strong culture is, so this question remains entirely open.
(3) Do evolving creatures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? I suspect this question is in fact much more context-dependent than it looks. We can fairly straightforwardly understand strength in this question to mean something like 'population resilience in the face of external environment shock,' but I suspect you'd just find a bunch of contradictory answers. An organism that's had it easy might have a high population, and they're harder to wipe out; an organism that's had it easy might have a narrow ecological niche (e.g. diet), so a highly specific environment shock might have a more devastating effect. I dunno if these factors make it a wash, but they're at least complex enough that I would reject any blanket statement like "success makes softness."
Yes indeed - I loved the Dune books and read GEoD pretty much when it was published (I was 14 in 1981). A wonderful fantasy with lots of highly questionable political and evolutionary ideas. Good to see the reviewer making the connection with AGI...
Zvi has this fantastic blog on his substack-blogroll as the only entry under "History". But I had not yet got to the fremen series, and it may be the best - so: big thanks for the link!
ACOUP is not exactly a neutral source of dispassionate analysis. IIRC he's even open on the blog itself about effectively rewriting history to be more leftist.
That must be the first historian ever not being "exactly a neutral source of dispassionate analysis". rofl (History was my minor, but I assume even tenured professors in gender-studies are not all "exactly a neutral source of dispassionate analysis". ) - He is open about it? Even that is not a first, but highly recommendable! - Seriously: This guy knows his field - military history - rather well + can explain it way better than most. And gives his main sources from primary sources plus relevant literature. The fun parts are comparing movies and games with historic reality. - When I studied in the nineties, there actually were some "rightist" history profs left - mostly on the, well, fringes of academia -but Dr. Bret C. Devereaux would not haven stricken anyone as "more-lefty-than-the-mainstream" even then. "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" may not be that pedantic, but it is very good, entertaining and sound historical writing.
History is never just "saying what was" - whatever Leopold von Ranke meant by that. One has a perspective; one has to omit information, as there is usu. too much of them; one has to choose how much weight to put on X and on Z (esp. when there is too little information). One has to define beginnings and ends that elude definition. It is not math, neither are gender studies. It is laughable to suggest otherwise. (So, yeah, it was a joke). The particular historian in question is a fine example of competence, clarity and neutrality - even though this terms are relative not absolute, when it comes to historians and other social sciences. Let us stop wasting time in the comments and start reading his blog: https://acoup.blog/2020/02/21/collections-the-fremen-mirage-interlude-ways-of-the-fremen/
Sure, all true, but... that still doesn't tell us whether this particular example is better or worse than others. I can tell you "all food has some bacteria upon it", but that doesn't mean you should choose to chow down on a rotting fowl (heh, heh) carcass.
Personally, I wasn't impressed with the single article (the first one in the collection linked above, I believe) I read from this fellow; it seemed to me that a) he missed the point entirely: the "Fremen trope" isn't at all contradicted by his examples of nomads being defeated *by organization* — the idea is often more about individual mettle, and as he himself points out, the "tougher" society often lost *due to being outnumbered*... which is not at all a problem for the idea behind the trope; a II.), he misses the point again when suggesting that "people had rich land because they won" is a contradiction of the trope: that's exactly what you'd expect were it true (win the good land --> grow weak --> lose the good land); b), he ignores relevant distinctions to adhere to the specific format of the trope he's selected (e.g., he often cites victories from agrarian societies without comparing further facets: the Assyrians lived tougher lives than the Babylonians and had more military success, but he ignores this comparison because neither is a "barbarian" society); and c), I could build an equally strong case merely from emphasizing different sources — say, Doric invasions, Greeks-as-barbarians vs settled Persians set against Persians-as-barbarians vs settled Assyrians set against Arabs-as-barbarians vs settled Persians, etc etc.
I haven't read enough of his stuff to have a strong opinion, though, and I believe you when you say he's not as bad as most.
>When I studied in the nineties, there actually were some "rightist" history profs left - mostly on the, well, fringes of academia but Dr. Bret C. Devereaux would not haven stricken anyone as "more-lefty-than-the-mainstream" even then.
Yeah but that is a pretty big problem in academia generally and history in particular. When the median historian is a borderline Marxist, you tend to get some pretty strange consensus on certain things.
True. For seemingly a lot of what is going on in parts of academia now - and what had been going in (maybe smaller, maybe larger) parts of academia before 1968 (Adorno, anyone?) . Still, it does not apply to the historian in question. So as I concluded in another thread: time to stop here and go to that outstanding blog ;) https://acoup.blog/2021/08/13/collections-teaching-paradox-victoria-ii-part-i-mechanics-and-gears/ or any other
He certainly has a political angle on things. I'd still trust him over a rando rightwing blogger who "read the classics" and likes gifs with Roman sculptures - despite leaning more right than left, myself.
You're also free to refer to the original sources that he tends to abundantly cite.
But you're not trusting him over a "rando rightwing blogger". You're trusting him over Frank Herbert, a war veteran turned journalist turned author, who is in this work among others taking the position that comfort breeds weakness and adversity breeds strength. And discussing it in some detail. He may be wrong, but he's not *obviously* wrong. And he may not specifically have a Ph.D. in History, but the sort of narrow credentialism that thinks that ends the argument *is* obviously wrong.
Not gonna lie, I'd watch a debate between Devereaux and Herbert.
Herbert was a good writer with great ideas, but that doesn't make him an expert in history and social psychology as examined in real life societies. The question of whether difficult conditions make a society stronger is to be decided by evidence, not twitter hot takes wrapped into flashy worldbuilding.
>that doesn't make him an expert in history and social psychology
Unfortunately, looking at present human society, there aren't *any* experts in those fields. That is, as long as you call an expert someone who can *get stuff done effectively and reliably*.
Our so-called experts are about as useful social scientists as alchemists were useful chemists. It's probably a required stage of development, but expertise it ain't.
>Herbert was a good writer with great ideas, but that doesn't make him an expert in history and social psychology as examined in real life societies
Correct, but only because you've got causality reversed. Being an expert in history and social psychology, is what made Herbert a good writer and gave him his great ideas. Or if not an expert, at least a well-read amateur. And again, "he doesn't have a Ph.D. so he knows less than the guy who has the Ph.D.", doesn't work here.
Herbert's military experience consisted of six months as a photographer.
L Ron Hubbard, OTOH, commanded two ships. And Scientology remains a successful going concern well after his death. Sounds like a man with a keen understanding of people. Perhaps we should follow his wisdom.
Or perhaps we should not rely merely on their backgrounds for judging their arguments.
Personally, I think Herbert's view falls apart pretty hard the second you get into the bit where the way to breed a humanity that cannot be governed is to...govern it harder. That's not how natural selection works.
Adversity certainly breeds strength to a point. But so does comfort, for that matter. All this bullshit about hard times making hard men smacks of Internet tough-guy-ism, and notably comes from people in what they would characterize as soft times.
>Personally, I think Herbert's view falls apart pretty hard the second you get into the bit where the way to breed a humanity that cannot be governed is to...govern it harder. That's not how natural selection works.<
That has nothing to do with the "hard times, hard men" concept, though. That's a plot device from his book, not the basis of the concept, and entirely unnecessary in making a case for it.
While reading ACOUP with an awareness of Bret Devereaux's biases is certainly wise, I can't think of an occaison when he advocates misrepresenting history to be more leftist. He talks about the problems of our sources, written overwhelmingly by male elites, obscuring or minimising the role of the poor and women, and how we might unearth a more complete view. Certainly an approach with dangers, but by no means a 1984 Ministry of Truth approach to history!
Yes, when he's describing how things were (as in his current logistics series), he appears to be trying to present history neutrally, and his left-wing-ness usually shows up when highlighting parts of history that have traditionally been relatively ignored. Which is great.
But when he's arguing for more general theses, like the "Fremen Mirage" or the series on the Dothraki, he goes into them with an axe to grind, and ignores or overlooks contrary evidence, while still reporting supporting evidence like a good historian. Instead of asking questions like a historian, he presents tacit assumptions. This has happened enough that I'm sadly inclined to be generally skeptical even when he's not doing that. (This is probably good training for a historian, though.)
tongue in cheek: Also I have major disagreements with his presentation of Marius and Sulla when he was discussing the Roman Republic a few months ago. But since he barely spent a paragraph on them, I kept my peace.
His Twitter presence seems to be building moderate-left social credit which he then spends on correcting far-left misconceptions, which is probably the most effective way to do that.
>Also I have major disagreements with his presentation of Marius and Sulla when he was discussing the Roman Republic a few months ago. But since he barely spent a paragraph on them, I kept my peace.
I think you are underestimating how cautious a non-tenured professor should be in regard to his public pronouncements about things. His level of caution is, IMO, likely just prudent. People get ANGRY when you point out things from history they don't like or expect.
I'm not a professional historian, but am well-read enough and naturally critical enough I found little or nothing to disagree with with the two you mention. What contrary evidence do you refer to?
To me, that sounds just as bad as a Ministry of Truth approach to history: if you really, *really* want male elites to have done less and poor women to have done more, and you keep running into the fact that evidence seems to indicate they really didn't do much more than the naive assumption might credit them with... well, what are you gonna do, *let the evil oppressors win?!*
There is a large distinction between desperately trying to turn people not doing things into having done things, and just trying to find out what they WERE doing at the time.
It is the distinction between saying a woman wrote Shakespeare (or trying to "but women were doing X THAT WAS IMPORTANT AND A BIG DEAL TOO" and trying to find out what women like Shakespeare's wife were doing at the time.
I just seem to keep running into the "ALSO WOMEN WERE MAKING VERY IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS THAT TOTALLY MATTER PROBABLY MORE THAN ANYTHING ACTUALLY" sort of approach *every single goddamn time* someone starts virtuously saying things about overwhelmingly† male this, elite powerful biased that, minimizing‡ amazing downtrodden women the other...
It's quite soured me on the whole idea.
-------------
(†some might say "disgustingly", even; not me of course but *some* brave goodhearted souls might, though I am neutral on this groundbreaking and righteous approach of course)
(‡ undoubtedly maliciously, those bastards. I hope someone takes 'em down a peg. Not that this will influence my findings! I am indifferent between being a heroic warrior of justice and reinforcing the system of minimization and oppression that I'm specifically looking to counteract...)
It's worth being precise about what ACOUP's excellent series shows. It argues (successfully) that 'hard' typically nomadic societies, with only a couple of exceptions, lose wars against 'soft' agrarian societies. Mainly because their economies suck (the superior economy of the agrarian society is what let them be soft in the first place), and a strong economy to equip, train and supply your army is quite handy in war.
They also tend to suck at diplomacy so that winnable wars spin into 'whoops, it's now most of the known world vs. us'.
That's certainly a relavent insight to Herbert's "and now the Freemen will conquer the universe" (though notice the Freemen start with control over the most valuable thing in the universe, which is a bit of an economic edge, and that badass nomads conquer everything isn't completely without precedent <cough> Mongols</cough>), but it's not quite the same as 'success can't make you soft'.
>the Freemen start with control over the most valuable thing in the universe
Exactly. Also, the Spacing Guild is in Paul's pocket, so their enemies have zero strategic mobility while theirs is assured. Also, their leader is the literal Messiah, and also a human supercomputer who can see the future.
Herbert really went ouf of his way to explain why the Fremen conquer the Imperium.
I don't doubt his history, but his understanding of Dune and the Fremen is incredibly wrong.
> They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).
Not really? Liet-Kynes, the leader of the Fremen before Paul, was an ecologist, not a warrior. The Fremen warrior culture wasn't just men, women and children force Sardaukar into retreat, and Paul's concubine Chani kills seasoned warriors in single combat. We don't see much strong evidence in the books that all Fremen men are warriors, just that all Fremen are better warriors than pretty much anyone else in the galaxy.
> Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes.
Oh god no. Paul and Jessica are both impressed by the level of sophistication and education of the Fremen, and they're two of the most sophisticated and educated people alive at the time. They teach their children advanced ecology, they have specialized industries that create stillsuits, water harvesters, and products made from spice.
> Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents.
Again, no. The Fremen have control of the most important resource in the universe, and are technologically sophisticated. They have advanced technology that no one else in the galaxy can replicate, it's just specialized for their environment. They are doing a terraforming project on their planet that no one else in the galaxy could possibly attempt, and in fact, they all think it's impossible. The Emperor sneers at the idea.
All these things are assumptions that the greater universe has about the Fremen, but the greater universe also thinks there are tens of thousands of Fremen, when in reality there are tens of millions. The Fremen intentionally keep their true nature and abilities secret, and they are successful in doing so because they aren't primitive, unadvanced, unspecialized, or uneducated, they are successful precisely because they are specialized to their environment.
Well spoken, still: in "the encyclopedia of DUNE" - I cite from memory - the victory of the Fremen against the empire (that would not consider 10.000.000 an impressive planetary population) is explained (at least to a big part) by: While the empire had 10 (or was it 20) supporting soldiers for one fighting soldier the Fremen soldiers were 90% fighting soldiers. (I remember asking British soldiers about those numbers and they said, "yep, we are 8 to 1, the Americans are 11 to 1 - cuz they have all those cola-truck-drivers." ). - The Comanche were very specialized to their environment. But the whole bunch of them - living as pastoral nomads in the prairie, a garden Eden by the standards of Arrakis - was just 20 to 30k ("Empire of the morning sun"). Overtaking the US a pipe-dream.- ACOUP best part of the "fremen-mirage" series imho is to show where that fantasy is coming from (not Herbert, but Herodot; and running amok in the 19th century. https://acoup.blog/2020/02/14/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-iiib-myths-of-the-atreides/
I know this is rather belated, but first of all, he's arguing against a Mirage. The actual Fremen are not particularly relevant to the argument, mostly because they're fictional, and thus a useful stand-in for the general concept.
Second, your "they're not warriors, it's just that every single one of them is more lethal than civilized society's trained killers" is...not a counter-argument.
Third, Paul and Jessica are impressed because they expect primitive barbarians. They also still are able to take advantage of Missionaria Protectiva manipulation of the culture. So the culture's entire spiritual belief structure is an imposed manipulation from outside. That's...not exactly an argument for sophistication.
Fourth, the Fremen are a bunch of people on one planet, in a desert. The larger society is an interstellar empire. They are 100% poor and lacking resources compared to their opponents. They have some advantages, and some abilities.
Fifth, you are overlooking the comments of Duke Leto about how the Fremen could be a resource like the Sardaukar, specifically because of how tough and dangerous the environment is. And then how the Fremen will roll over the empire. And then how Leto's Fremen bodyguards will be ultimately disbanded because they've gone soft because things aren't tough enough any more. That's the thing Devereux is arguing against, and the Fremen ARE a rather prominent example of it.
Likewise, the fact that the genetic-memory nonsense is not actually true in the real actual world strongly undermines the applicability of anything like the long-term spring-winding that Leto employs to try to make humanity ungovernable. Since real actual genetics is much more Markovian than presented here -- "pressure" does not accumulate over generations -- Leto's millennia of perfect tyranny would tend to straightforwardly strip out the ungovernable tendencies he's ostensibly trying to promote. It only makes sense in the context of this fictional framing of genetics that bears no resemblance to reality.
>And common sense should tell us that we live in a much softer environment than any of our historical and prehistorical forebears, and yet we do much tougher things than they ever did (like live to 90, for example).
What? There's nothing tough about this. We are not living into our 90s because we're tougher - its because out environment is "softer". Life was shorter in the past precisely because things were tougher. And I imagine that people who lived through genuine hardship (which was a MUCH more common experience in western countries in the past than today) would handle the problems associated with old age better than people do today and will do in the future (controlling for life being easier in the future).
>(1) Do individual people tend to become weaker given success/a soft environment? This is a question about human psychology. My feeling is that the answer is unambiguously no, but there's always room for argument.
Do you imagine we're as tough as Americans 100 years ago? Do you think people today would handle the idea of having to live through something comparable to the great depression or fight in something like WW2 half as well as the Americans who actually lived through these things did? For WW2, this seems so obviously not the case that it's almost comical to even ask. As for the depression, the vastly more mild experience of covid-19 and how poorly many people took it suggests the answer is also a resounding no. What have younger Americans ever done that compares to stuff like this?
At the very least, it's an open question as to how they would handle genuine hardship and certainly not unambiguously a "no" towards people becoming weaker.
>(3) Do evolving creatures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? I suspect this question is in fact much more context-dependent than it looks.
Well, once you had to be tough to live long enough to reproduce and be able to provide for your. Today in western countries, virtually everyone survives long enough to reporduce and can provide for children enough for them to grow up and reproduce. This means that in theory, reproduction no longer meaningfully selects for toughness (of any kind), meaning more non-tough people are passing on their genes than earlier times in history.
You just seem to be saying the tough guy theory to me. And some of your "facts" don't seem to match up to the reality of these events.
For example: "the vastly more mild experience of covid-19"
There's been 1 million US covid deaths; WW2 caused a little under 500,000 US casualties. Those two numbers aren't necessarily comparable, of course. But when one thing kills twice as many as another, calling it "vastly more mild" without any argument seems premature.
And "something like WW2 half as well as the Americans who actually lived through these things;" "covid-19 and how poorly many people took it"
Do you know how people "took" WW2? I know it's mythologised in the history books (so much more in my native Britain - all that blitz spirit, what ho!), but in reality was there mental illness? depression? social upheaval? political backlash? If you know the answers to these questions, I'd be interested to hear. But the surface level 'they were tough back in the old days' doesn't seem to me to be well supported. It's just the four Yorkshiremen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k
COVID mostly killed old people. If we had done nothing at all about it, more people would have died, but they'd still mostly be old people and eventually everyone would have some immunity due to prior infection. Contrast with what happens absent fighting back in WW2: the enemy wins.
Folk beliefs about mental illness appear to be wrong. Suicide rates went down under COVID-19 because shared societal hardship is actually bearable. There's also a "rally round the flag effect" where people support their government more when it's fighting a war, although this does diminish over time (and took longer during WW2 because it was a big war and the Allies were more successful than, for example, Italy).
Thanks. I'm not sure if this is in agreement or disagreement with me, or just some relevant comments. I basically agree with what you wrote (to the extent that I understand anything).
>(3) Do evolving creatures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? I suspect this question is in fact much more context-dependent than it looks.
Totally agree, I think that it really depends, especially on the cause of mortality. In cases where mortality is unpredictable, harsh environment with high mortality select for short lifes and early reproduction. In our species, it is for example thought that the different, and usually genetically unrelated, populations of very short people have evolved their reduced height because they lived in environment with high mortality that favored very early reproduction, which was associated with being very short.
Another example, polynesians have historically been subjected to a high risk of starvation, especially during the episodes of colonization, which led to a greater tendency towards storage of calories.
Both examples are quite clearly adaptations produced by living in harsh enviroments, but I would not call them "increased thougness".
> If the research shows us anything, it's that winners tend to win more.
In addition to Jason Maguires excellent rebuttal of your point, let me give a counter-example on a societal level: The Roman Republic, and the early Roman Empire, was exceptionally successful over a long period. This success, together with the lack of existential external threats, invited corruption and infighting, which weakened their society and ultimately led to their downfall.
This doesn't make any sense at all. I'm no historian, so this is just Wiki history, but check this out: "In 376, unmanageable numbers of Goths and other non-Roman people, fleeing from the Huns, entered the Empire...In 476, the Germanic barbarian king Odoacer deposed the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in Italy"
That is, it took the Roman Empire a full century to fall. In that time how many other states rose and fell? How many other countries did those Goths wipe out? You've made what I call "half an argument": you've identified that one bad thing happened (the Roman Empire fell), and then jumped to the conclusion: so it must have been weak. What you've failed to do is compare it to a control group. The question should be: was the Roman Empire weaker than other states/empires? And the answer to that seems to be no. It was a tough nut, so tough it stood for a century even after being fatally undermined. And then it persisted for another five centuries in a different center. That sound like winning to me. History certainly doesn't seem to show that after experiencing a period of success, the Roman Empire was weaker than the average empire.
That's an assertion that the Romans themselves made, but it doesn't bear up too much examination. It was the Roman way to look at their ancestors as stronger and better than the current crop of corrupt fools, and they'd been profession doom upon Rome long before Julius Caesar showed up. It is just as valid to look at the the Roman Empire staying roughly as strong as they ever were and their opponents growing to match them, as it is to say the Roman Empire declined to the point where they were overrun by enemies they could handily beat before. Indeed, there is more to suggest the former than the later with increasing sophistication of Germanic tribes visible in the archaeological record.
If the Romans were brought down by the Persians, you might have a point. But the Germans did not grow in sophistication until they reached the Romans, rather the Romans regressed to the point that they could be defeated and then civilization detectably declined. We can tell from pollen that forests grew over what was once agricultural land, traces of pollution went down as metalworking declined. Of course it was something like a decade ago* that I was reading books about the Roman collapse and only more recently** that I've been reading allegorical scifi takes on it of the sort Herbert was responding to.
"success can make you soft," "soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce" This seems to have been an important idea for Herbert, as it is central to the Dune and Dosadi cycles, and he mentionsit again and again within the novels.
Like you, I have always found it very unconvincing. It seems obvious to me that people who have the misfortune to live in very bad circumstances do not become super strong. My impression was that FH had in mind some kind of natural selection process, but it does not make sense in the context that he described.
For all three of those, consider the difference between eustress and distress and the process of hormesis.
On a social/species scale you can also cull the less adapted, which certainly is _a_ strategy, the question is how many useful traits you're losing in the process and how steep the terrain around the local minimum becomes.
I think that a less personality-related example would be just the physical changes that happen in a tougher environment. If you repeatedly use your hands for a mildly damaging activity (playing the guitar for example), you will build calluses and then your hands will stop being hurt. If I were to start playing guitar with my soft fingers, it would not go as well as it would for a guitar player, or probably also for a physical laborer.
Some things, like muscle mass, would probably vary. We are much larger than people historically were (in the US at least), and so we probably could be stronger. But at the same time over one third of the US is obese, so we aren't taking advantage of our opportunities to become healthier than our ancestors. Overall, for most physical activities, I would bet on a medieval peasant over a modern American.
Maybe just to make sure I'm making a point here, I think that generally I would say something more like "going through a situation prepares you to go through more like it." I don't think a medieval peasant could function in modern society, and I don't think that a modern person could function as a medieval peasant
"guitar...calluses...soft..." I see the point of this example, but there is an obvious counter: If I had a weak back (true story!), and then repeatedly strained it by lifting heavy things at odd angles, am I going to get (a) stronger or (b) weaker? I think your example of learning a skill in such a way as to strengthen yourself physically is actually a very very very narrow part of the whole spectrum of things that people do. The reason you think of it is that while 99% of the things you can do with a guitar just hurt you, generations of teachers have successfully distilled the best way to learn and develop those calluses in a way that merely strengthens you. This is highly sophisticated cultural knowledge. If you attempted to learn, I dunno, Mongolian throat singing, without a professional teacher, there is a fair possibility that you could damage your throat/vocal chords.
"for most physical activities, I would bet on a medieval peasant over a modern American"
I think I'd take that bet. I see what you're imagining: a sturdy farmer vs. an obese computer jockey. But if the test is to be fair, we should be looking at average against average. (To make it really fair, I want to include all the dead peasants who died of infectious disease, but that is perhaps a bit tendentious!) I reckon the average mediaeval peasant is a bit stunted from childhood malnutrition, and has had a disease or two in his time, so he doesn't breathe quite so well as he did. I'll bet on the average corn-fed American over that guy, pudgy though they undoubtedly are.
"going through a situation prepares you to go through more like it" - First, I don't think this quite captures what toughness is. I think toughness is the ability to handle something significantly worse than the everyday. And second, as with the skill training examples above, I don't think it's really true, unless done as a very careful training program. Going underwater a lot *may* train you to be a better free diver. But 9 times out of 10 it's just going to train you to be dead. Getting hit *can* train you to accept blows, as part of a boxing or martial arts program; but in most situation it's just going to injure you. Example: My brother got punched in a mugging, and it didn't make him stronger, just agoraphobic and afraid to leave the house for a year or so.
I think this is a good point, and perhaps I would rephrase it to "going through a situation adapts you against such situations." I agree with you that this doesn't always mean you get tougher. Sometimes when you play guitar, you get calluses, and you get good. Sometimes you say "well darn, that hurts, and then go play piano." I think it probably depends on which is going on.
I think that there are many ways to structure a peasant v moderner showdown in unfair ways. For example, if we went off of age, you'd have a teenager facing off against a 38 year old. Yeah, if you include dead people, things get weird, because the average American is also dead, and dead at a very old age. So you'd have a very anticlimactic showdown between a 80 year old with a terminal disease vs a newborn baby. I think this probably just shows it was a bad point that's a bit nonsensical upon further consideration.
I would absolutely bet on the random American over the random medieval peasant if it was a pie-eating contest or rifle marksmanship challenge, due to the peasant's probable uncorrected vision problems, and near-certain lack of experience with firearms or functionally unlimited quantities of pie.
It's taken me all this time and argument to figure out what kind of a fallacy this is, but I think I've finally got there.
I don't know what the official name of this fallacy is, but it's of the form: if A implies B, then B implies A.
The tough guy fallacy starts with this premise: In order to get tough, you must go through some hard times. It draws the conclusion: If you go through hard times, then you get tough.
Now, I don't even agree with the premise, but you can see where it comes from: lots of skills and endurance abilities require hard training to achieve, and this hard training often feels unpleasant to the people who do it.
But in reality, lots of skills are acquired pleasurably. Music lovers learn an instrument because they enjoy it. People who do sport for fun often get fit while having a good time. Kids learn to read sitting on their parents' laps. So I don't think this premise holds.
But even if that premise is accepted, it's still clear that the conclusion doesn't follow. It's not the case that any hard time necessarily makes you stronger. Only certain kinds of carefully designed hard times do that.
I gave up on this review about halfway through. The writing is too disorganized and rambling, which is not a style I enjoy reading.
I do find the concept of a "human that can threaten AI" to be quite interesting, though. From what I can tell, the answer (in the novel) seems to be a form of genetic engineering. But can anyone recommend me some books that explore this concept? I.e. in order to be competitive with machines, humans have to start becoming more ambitious with their "biological" status.
It's good that you stopped, because also that interesting concept was wrong, in the sense that the reviewer didn't read very carefully and that wasn't what the book was talking about at all.
> Today, those thoughts are old hat, but this book came out in 1981.
And the meaning of this fact still hasn't really hit this subculture in the face hard enough yet. He wasn't before his time, he was _at_ his time.
I swear to God. A subculture of autodidacts who never really thought about how uneducated that made them, and what very real implications that had for their ignorance. Discovering those books now, late in the plot, believing they were the main character or at least knew him.
God played a cruel trick on the SFBA Rationalists.
You are right. mea culpa. I stand ready to expand on my comment, if any questions may arise. For now just two friendly hints: a) Reading fictional texts in a context different from the context they are written in, is not only legitimate, but unavoidable. No reader has exactly the same context as the author at her/his time of writing. Not even the author. As I have heard authors openly admit. (G.R. Martin may find it difficult to write the end of "A song of ice and fire" the same way he intended before it became GoT.)
Appreciated. But the reader I commented with "si tacuisses" might feel less amused. And Scott A. disapproval of unkind+unhelpful comments is known and fully justified. - b) sounds too nice, considering "auto-didact" was said as a slight. Hetero-didact? Acolyte? School-boy? "force-fed information at the whim of others/ due to institutional consent"? Educated to form, not content - nor to ones own interests?
You're not a philosopher just because you sling Latin with a smug coy grin. In fact the pretense of the SFBA Rationalists, that they aspired to philosophy when they amounted to quackery, is precisely this sort of thin dress too scandalous to be formal and too clothed to be liberating.
Tell the story however you want. A good Liberal Arts education provides a _grounding_ in a common core of reading. You think people waste their time reading books in concentrated study, that suggests to me _envy_ not _superiority_.
You can't strip me of my credentials, vis a vis philosophizing, because I already know I'm in the vulgar online places. The fact that you think you have credentials is precisely the delusion I am gesturing towards.
Thanks for your willing participation, you expose your writing as farcical.
MD Scott Alexander Siskind got a formal degree in philosophy before he got a degree in medicine and psychiatry. All this after a very formal education in a very good formal school, where he excelled in English. The other authors in this part of the internet usu. also hold degrees, often "only" STEM, admittedly. I do have an M.A. in humanities. So what? "A good Liberal Arts education provides a _grounding_ in a common core of reading." I heard that claim before, not sure it's true. I did some reading, for sure. Again, so what? Shall we measure the heights of our piles of read tomes to conclude who is "better educated" - ein Schwanz-Vergleich? - Does ONLY a "good Liberal Arts education provides a _grounding_ in a common core of reading"? Are only people with an L.A. degree allowed to read and discuss Moby-Dick? - Anyway, you so smart and competent: Here is your chance to be be useful: Tell how exactly it is wrong to read a novel from year X in year Z to see how its ideas may apply to questions in year Z. Explain what Herbert wanted to show in his time (an interesting read, if done well), and in which specific places this review got specific things wrong. Please.
I'm used to it, having written in politics in many of the online spaces associated with the SFBA Rationalists. A younger me thought they took their credo seriously, but they are just as vain and egotistical in their belief systems, as mechanical and hyena-like in their group dynamics, as any other posturing ballroom of would-be intellectuals. "If SFBA Rationalists are largely composed of quacks, I want to believe SFBA Rationalists are largely composed of quacks."
Turns out "true" and "necessary" are subjective, which is something that the SFBA Rationalist does not understand as they, tragically, tend to believe that they and they alone have apprehended an objective reality.
It's a pretty hilarious misread, and a pretty hilarious trick, from a certain point of view. "EY is Leto, this is about AI" is so wrong it made me happy, like "oh, those silly rationalists. Mostly Harmless, I guess".
As a casual aside, I wonder if Frank Herbert read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and got the idea of Hwi Noree from one of the female characters (Diaochan) because of the shared plot elements of an assassination plot against the ruler/emperor orchestrated by the opposition using a femme fatale as bait, involving a jealousy-induced betrayal by the emperor's right-hand man. Or maybe this is a more common plot device than I thought.
It's certainly common in Chinese history writing (or historical myth writing, which is what most premodern Chinese histories were). Xi Shi was used for the same purpose, at least. I feel like there were more, but I couldn't them on a couple of quick Googles.
lol I'm not versed in Chinese classical literature, but just happened to listen to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast a few weeks ago, so the similarities popped out.
I was never fond of the "Golden Path" stuff from the second book onwards. It felt like it squandered the themes of the first novel, about the dangers of heroic narrative and being swept along by forces beyond your control. Then we get to the 2nd and 3rd books, and it turns out we really did need the Hero after all - in fact, without him, humanity is going to go extinct!
I do like "God Emperor of Dune", though. Weird book, and often pretty funny. There's a running gag about how every time someone finds out that Leto is "getting married" to Hwi, they immediately look at his giant worm-body for genitalia - he eventually thinks that maybe he should have some big appendance grafted on to shock them.
Not a fan of the last two books either. Only good things in those were Miles Teg, weird child form Miles Teg, that surprisingly explicit sex scene from "Heretics", and the genuinely sad parts where you see a planet's biosphere get destroyed (I remember thinking that would have been more interesting if the project had failed because of unseen parasites/wildlife/etc that undermined it).
I rather liked the part in the second half of "Heretics" where they were skulking around on Gammu. The world -building felt almost Vancian. I wish he hadn't taken that swipe at "Star Wars", though.
I just...what? Totally bouncing off this one. There's too much inside-baseball, in both directions: I did read several of the __Dune__ series years and years ago, but wasn't all that interested in it, and definitely don't remember enough to understand all the references and implications here. And on the other side, either it's a really overstretched metaphor, or I'm *way* too ignorant about AI x-risk to see the connection. Just reads like excessive pattern-matching to me, the same way the review of __The Society of the Spectacle__ attempted to grant retroactive prescience credit to some dead French guy. Predicting the future is easy and common if you go looking for it...
Even aside from all that, I find it impossible to rank a book review of the lone fiction entry in an otherwise all-nonfiction field. Too hard to get over the (well-deserved imo) innate reflex to be really suspicious of Arguments from Fictional Evidence. And as the reviewer openly admits, this is a really unpopular book, even among those strictly evaluating it as typical scifi...
One last quibble:
>Nayla represents the balance of humanity’s nobility against its flaws
...who the hell is Nayla? That name isn't referenced anywhere else in the review.
The metaphor is not supported by the text. I find it almost numerological in its willingness to force this interpretation.
I also feel like the review makes a lot of mistakes assuming the reader has series and book knowledge. Nayla is the most glaring of these, but there are a lot of things that only make sense if you've *already* read the book.
Seeing Leto as a sort of AI is weird given Herbert's emphasis on human evolution.
The central theme of the entire Dune series is that natural selection ( Arrakis, Salusa Secundus) and artificial selection (Bene Gesserit, Siona) are a superior path to building machines (The Butlerian Jihad, Ix) or direct genetic engineering (Bene Tleilax). Leto has taken over the Bene Gesserit artificial selection plans and applied them until humanity surpassed him. That was his Golden Path. The successful assassination was Leto's own death-by-Siona long term plan.
This natural selection theme is also central to Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment where humans and aliens are isolated on a hostile planet for generations resulting in a population tougher and more capable than the general population softened by peace and prosperity
I also believe that it is FH's idea, but I think that it is really mistaken.
Natural selection does not select for "thougness", it selects for survival. For example, there are many unrelated human populations which are genetically very short. They have in common to live in very harsh environments with high mortality, especially from parasites. Their short stature is supposed to be advantageous in these environment because it allows them to reproduce a bit earlier, a good thing if you are going to die very young.
Basically, environments with a lot of mortality can select for many things depending on the cause of the mortality, and certainly not "thougness" as a general law.
From the point of view of superintelligence risk, it doesn't matter all that much whether we build the superintelligence, genetically engineer it, or breed it - the potential downsides are largely the same. So I think it does make sense to consider Leto II as a superintelligence of the sort that AI safety advocates worry about, even if Frank Herbert wasn't interested in AI risk in the narrow sense.
It matters a great deal towards determining the character and form of the superintelligence, which in turn determines the nature of the effort to manage its risk. Eliezer and MIRI and the AI safety organizations are funded to manage a *specific* type of superintelligence risk in a *specific* way: programmed entities that need "alignment" work in their development.
It's a fallacy bordering on slick trickery to point to Herbert's work and say "See? He was worried about <general development of capabilities>, therefore we should fund <specific programming effort>".
It's particularly fallacious or slick because the fandom and literary analysis around this particular series has *already* settled the issue: there is always a shallow popular reading of Dune that says the Butlerian Jihad was about malicious AI, particularly since his son's books went in that direction, and there is *always* a consensus literary analysis that the Jihad was left intentionally vague because Herbert was more concerned about human capabilities and the negative effect of convenience technology. That is, it didn't matter to him whether we built superintelligence or just great iPhones and machine assistants, because either way he saw these things making too many of us mentally weak the same way the physical conveniences of his time had already made too many of us physically weak.
Simply: Herbert isn't about "someday mankind build robot God, robot God bad". He is about "mankind build car for legs, ride car everywhere, legs get weak, car bad. Oh no, someday mankind build car for brain, ride brain car everywhere, brain get weak... brain car bad!"
I'm entirely prepared to believe that the reviewer is wrong about the Butlerian Jihad, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether we can view Leto through the lens of superintelligence risk.
It's like the question of whether we can view Iron Man or C-3PO or Big Bird or Captain Hook through the lens of superintelligence risk. You can, you are allowed, but people who know the material are going to miss a beat and then look at you real funny.
I'm trying to use reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate that that's not true at all. A very glib surface reading of God Emperor of Dune makes it seem like a decent fit, but it's a famously obtuse book, so... the surface reading is wrong. Not "I think the author meant this" wrong, but "the author clearly says otherwise, you just weren't paying attention" wrong. So to someone who took the deeper reading, this looks like Big Bird. It looks very ridiculous.
"Oh no, someday mankind build car for brain, ride brain car everywhere, brain get weak... brain car bad!"
Plato wrote that Socrates was against writing, because it ruined people's memory and that it would lead people to misunderstand ideas because the person who created the ideas wouldn't be there to correct the misunderstandings.
The first book is the best and most essential. There are worthwhile adaptations of it as well. I understood all the references in this review even though I’ve only read that first book, “Dune” - and that was many years ago
The first book, "Dune", is a classic in its own right, and has a lot of essential world-building information. Its core is the story of Leto's father's rise to power. I'd consider this essential, in large part because it will let you know which parts of GEoD are intended to be familiar and which parts are intended to be strange.
The second book, "Dune Messiah", is the story of Leto's father's fall from power. It introduces the prescience trap, imperial morality, Face Dancers, gholas, and ends with Leto's birth. The third book, "Children of Dune", is the story of Leto's rise to power. It introduces Leto at his most human, the Abomination trap, sandtrout, and the "Golden Path". I wouldn't call them "essential", but I truly don't know what GEoD would seem like without their context. Fortunately, they're shorter and more narratively straightforward than "Dune" or GEoD.
Actually, I'm now quite curious as to what GEoD would seem like, having skipped books 2 and 3. As described in the review, there's a character from "Dune", Duncan Idaho, who dies partway through. By the time of GEoD, they've figured out how to resurrect him (as a "ghola") with memories intact, but only the memories of his original life up until his original death. So in book 4, a new one of these gholas shows up, and as far as he's concerned, he skipped straight from the middle of "Dune" into one of the early chapters of GEoD. So maybe read "Dune" but stop when Duncan dies? ;-)
Two things: 1. AI is explicitly "done with" in the Dune-iverse: There had been an AI-war/luddite revolt, the Butlerian Jihad. Humans won. THAT story is: history. Thus the main (?) idea of this review - the story of "GEoD" as an allegory/mirror/prescient 1981 version of "YUDvsAI" - seems off by a wide margin.
2. Loved the review. Well written. 35 years since I read Dune, appreciate the memory. :D
Nice ending of a review of a book that I will never read.
However, the ending begs the question of why so many are afraid of an AI killing us all. We all know that mankind must go extinct sooner or later, so why not go with a bang rather than a long drawn-out whimper?
In the foreseeable future, humanity’s lot is to live in societies dominated by the old. That is, in (hopefully) safe and pleasant societies (the way old people like it), but also stagnant and sclerotic societies. Africa will be the last continent with zest and youthful vigor, but the demographic transition is in full swing there also, and 100 years from now even Niger will probably look like Japan. The future is old take-no-risks societies, not steampunk or fun dystopian Mad Max scenarios. More than 90 of the 194 countries in the world already have fertility rates below 2,1 (reproduction level), and the 60+ age group is the fastest-growing population group everywhere.
Given this likely, whimperish future, why not welcome a superior-being AI that kills us off and replaces us, since such an AI will be cleverer, and also better able to further explore Cosmos – since AI machines are likely to be better suited to millennium-type space travel than living organisms.
...not that I think such an AI event is ever to materialize, but if one for the sake of argument assumes that the superior-AI-is-coming people are right: Hell, why not go out with a Bang, since go we sooner or later must.
New virus might help, agree with that. As well as bacteria that are resistant to all antibiotics. Then, even minor surgeries will carry high mortality again.
But then again, humans have become really good at designing new counter-strategies in our never-ending arms race with virus and bacteria. Also, to be more relaxed with regard to illnesses that are fatal mainly among the old is considered ageism. "We do not have a 90 year old to lose", as was said during the recent covid-19 pandemic.
More seriously, if I were to write a scifi story, I would not choose a hybrid sand worm/human ruling Dune as the protagonist (a scenario I regard as only slightly less improbable than AI killing all of us here on Earth). I would instead describe what life is like when the global demographic transition has run its course, and all societies have the demographic profile as Japan, only more extreme. The protagonist should recognize the pleasantness of these societies - pleasant as a picture of water lilies in a stagnant pool. But also acknowledge the melancholy of gradual stagnation - like the drawn-out and ever-more distant roar of a once magnificent species. A bit like the Savage in Huxley's Brave New World.
I would further portray this pleasant-dystopian global society as an unintended side-effect of the triumph of Science. With a nod to Asimov, and how the Three Laws of Robotics ultimately leads to AIs preserving humans as a cossetted snowflake species, living in the totally risk-free environment created for them by mighty AI robots following the letters of the Laws.
Man, I feel like we are already so far down this path.
I want to take risks, I want to face death and win on my own terms.
And this society has gotten to the point where I got disciplined for "creating an unsafe work environment." by crushing a can of coke in my hand to demonstrate my impotent rage while complaining about how much I hate "safetyism."
Related: My nutshell prediction concerning the evolutionary long-term dangers AI pose for humanity: AI will not kill us with a sword. But it may possibly crush us with a pillow.
"Bene Gesserit were essentially witches who could draw on the ancestral memories of women in their ancestral line"
Yup.
"and they bred this ability into Paul, Leto’s father."
Nope, nope, noppity nope. This explicitly does not happen in Dune. Paul says "I'm not what they expected".
"As a bonus, they can also draw on male ancestor’s memories"
See above. This is apparently the actual point of the Bene Gesserit breeding program - to create a male version of a Reverend Mother, who has access to the Other Memories of the male line.
"as well as having a pretty good ability to predict the future and know what’s going on in the present."
Gawd.
The BG attempt to plan the future, not predict it, by examining the past - via Other Memory. They are aware that their methodology has a fatal flaw - they can only examine half of the past, hence the breeding program. Note what Paul's insight into the BG is in the testing scene early on in Dune, whilst the Atreides are still on Caladan - they do politics. Mohaim then says that the Spacing Guild does a form of higher mathematics.
Until Paul shows up, nobody is really aware of the capability of the spice to produce prescient visions.
These are fundamental errors in understanding the set up in Dune, let alone GEoD. As a consequence, it's difficult to take the review seriously.
You didn't read Dune very carefully. Paul does indeed have his male line Other Memory, and the Bene Gesserit are aware of prescience - Jessica asks RM Mohiam if she can use her limited prescience to see what will happen to the Atreides on Arrakis. The Fremen and the Spacing Guild also use spice for its prescience-granting effects, those effects are known.
"Jessica asks RM Mohiam if she can use her limited prescience to see what will happen to the Atreides on Arrakis."
This exchange?
J: "I ask only what you see in the future with your superior abilities."
M : "I see in the future what I've seen in the past."
I don't read that as being a reference to prescience, only Other Memory.
"Paul does indeed have his male line Other Memory". Whereabouts? I've certainly never noticed it.
The Guild, certainly. Paul claims he knows their secret after he changes the Water. But, it is their secret. Ergo, no-one outside the Guild realise. For the Fremen - same thing really. I think Paul suspects that they, as a people, have some very limited ability - in the Sietch Orgy scene? But again, the Fremen as a people, are either completely ignored by the Imperial society, or completely unknown. So, "nobody is really aware of the capability of the spice to produce prescient visions" stands up, I reckon.
"She is as refined as her father, with none of his domestication."
Who is her father?
"Nayla represents the balance of humanity’s nobility against its flaws"
Unlike the other characters mentioned in this paragraph, this is your first time referencing Nayla. Was Nayla supposed to have a section?
"if AI is inevitable then the dominance of a specific AI is likely"
I know Robin Hanson disagress with this. In Dune, it's because machines in general have been suppressed so there wouldn't be any other AIs to compete with the first to emerge.
I read up to the part where it mentioned AI risk and then I rolled my eyes and stopped reading - nothing against the review or the reviewer. I have really enjoyed this blog and SSC before it for several years, though I’m not really a part of the hardcore rationalist base. But I haven’t made the mental switch to prediction markets and AI risk with everyone else. Sometimes the prediction markets reveal something interesting, but I am unable to make myself care about AI risk beyond enjoying Asimov’s robot stories. I cant bring myself to believe that it poses a real and imminent threat, and I tire of reading about it. Maybe it’s just me.
I'm all in on prediction markets, less interested in AI. Prediction markets actually exist, in limited form, and we can see how well calibrated they are. The AI people talk most about right now mostly seems like a toy and not something one would rely on to, say, make money by out-predicting those markets.
It is not just you. I have practical work experience in math and machine learning, and AI risk feels *very silly* to me. I don't care to support that feeling with discussion in the comments, but this other writer did a very good and entertaining job presenting the arguments against taking AI-risk seriously: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
He makes some good points but his "Argument from Slavic Pessimism" actually fits Eliezer's current predictions, and his "Argument from Complex Motivations" is completely unpersuasive to me, relying on fictional evidence and saying some outcome is "very likely" without reason for anyone else to consider it likely at all. The "Argument from Gilligan's Island" could have been persuasive if he cited "The Secret of Our Success" instead of a silly old sitcom that required its characters to fail in order to keep going.
Obviously it's not just you. But Scott is pretty big on AI risk and I'm fairly certain it's still his blog - most people who think the AI thing is somewhere between slightly exaggerated and utterly absurd probably keep quiet about it. Sure, there's some pushback, as there also is against rationalism more generally and EA more particularly, but much less than there would be if Scott had anti- AI risk views.
I kinda feel that a rationalist reading something non-AI and seeing AI metaphors is the equivalent of a medieval European scholar reading something pagan and seeing Christian metaphors, or Freud reading anything and seeing penises and vaginas. Literature is a giant Rorschach blot.
I definitely read the review as saying more about the rationalist community and less about the book. I've definitely seen examples of what you're talking about before, but this time it was a bigger leap in an area I'm more familiar with. Personally, I'm updating from "rationalists take AI-risk way too seriously" to "rationalists have religious blindness about AI-risk".
The Religion 2.0 take in the link you provided in your other comment is interesting. Maybe unfair to apply it too broadly, but at the core there is something there. In light of Scott’s prior post, it may not be true that non-believers will believe *anything*, but at least for some the urge to believe in *something* is strong, and rationalism/AI/transhumanism can fit the bill.
One interesting thing is the idea that AGI is no longer seen as rotting. This is an interesting deviation, because for science fiction author Vernor Vinge, who wrote the first popular books about both the singularity and malignant AI, rot was a given, and in fact rot was a crucial plot point for AGIs!
1. Imo, you have to put the author's full name in the first paragraph of a book review.
2. I read Frank Herbert's trilogy in the late 70s, probably because of the release of Children of Dune. I have a recollection of picking up God Emperor when it came out and putting it down after a dozen pages. After all these years I can't recall whether that was because it bored me, or the difference between being in college and high school, or because I just had more important things to read. Thankfully, this review confirms I probably didn't miss much.
If I'd seen "God Emperor of Dune, by the late Franklin Patrick "Frank" Herbert Jr." in the first paragraph of this review, I'd have laughed out loud.
The review misinterprets the book pretty badly, so I wouldn't take it as confirmation of anything. But God Emperor was a huge weird leap from "thoughtful space opera" to "the odd musings of an immortal", so you probably had the right sense of whether you wanted to make that leap or take the exit.
I have previously suggested that properly evaluating book reviews might well require reading the underlying original text (revealing my great books educated snobbery I guess.) But I'm also thinking that an even stronger case could be made for not reinventing the wheel. Why new book reviews at all when there are old book reviews available?
Is it even more problematic when basically the review threads are being "subcontracted" out? At least John Leonard had his name on the byline, was being paid, and probably has some copyright interest in his review.
New book reviews that intentionally review the book with a different intended audience can do something useful for that audience that the old review couldn't. The review up here aims to provide an interesting discussion of how some of the themes of this book explore ideas that might be of interest to people with worries about AI alignment, which the old Times review didn't. The old Times review has the virtue of brevity, and (as suggested by the end) seems to be intended for an audience that has already read the first three books and is trying to figure out whether or not to read this one (and the answer I get is "if you're really obsessed you will have to read it, and if you're not, you probably should have stopped a few books ago").
I disagree with your characterization of the Two final books. I thought Chapterhouse Dune was basically an encounter with death, or rather a "final message before departing". Heretics was about the danger of autocratic control. But, of course, with any book what you see depends on what you bring to it.
With God Emperor you've certainly nailed major themes, though I disagree about it not having a plot. And I consider Dune Messiah to be the weakest book in the series. (I've only read it a couple of times.)
My takeaway from this review is, "We should build Optimus Prime then probably stop building autobots before we're sure humans alone could beat Decepticons," and I couldn't agree more.
During the last book review season I mistook Scott's review of 1001 Nights for a contest submission and was like "wow, this is creative and unusually good, I might vote for it". This review feels like an attempt to recapture that, uh, magic. It's not as successful-- the attempt to draw lessons about AGI from it comes off as forced-- but I still enjoyed it. It strikes about the right balance of snark and appreciation for discussing Herbert's work (and Yudkowsky's). On the other hand it has noticeable weak points: it fails to question Herbert's silly notions of how a world might operate (e.g. the "hard times / strong men" meme that acoup.blog's "Fremen Mirage" series addresses) and the presentation is rough around the edges. On the whole I don't expect to be voting for it but I enjoyed reading it and might actually give the book a try (I've read the first three). As always, many thanks for contributing!
Don't worry, no pronunciation guide was given, not even in the glossary or appendices of the first book! Fans can't even agree on how to pronounce the surname of the main villain. ;-P
Hwi Noree was one-dimensional in the extreme...but Herbert seemed to acknowledge that and claimed that she was designed that way.
Her one-dimension was being like an uber-empathic mirror.
Which lets her understand Leto (at least at some level), and after his 3500 years of loneliness, that is like an intoxicating, addictive substance to him.
And Leto realizes that it is a trap, and damns the Ixians and Tleilaxu for doing it...but then falls into the trap anyways.
It doesn't make Hwi Noree a more interesting character, but it makes her role in the story more tolerable.
Also, I kind of think that Leto let himself fall into that trap only because he successfully set Siona on her path.
The 'Good AI that coddles us and thereby makes us weak' is pretty much the crux of The Culture series by Iain Banks, which I love almost as much as the Dune series.
I think Herbert was far more thought provoking, and I kind of recoil at the thought of being the 'pets' of AI like the non-AI citizens of The Culture are....but Banks' books are also excellent.
Interestingly (at least to me), in Dune the goal is specifically to help humans develop superhuman abilities and spread forever.
In The Culture, humans being modified to become so intelligent that they even somewhat rival AIs is strongly frowned-upon as unwise, if not impossible.
That wasn't quite my take-away from the Culture. Most humans from the Culture are soft and useless, but it's fine; they don't need to be anything else. If the Culture existed in a Frank Herbert novel, their softness would doom them, but that doesn't happen in the stories they're actually in.
We differ slightly in our reads of the main point of the book. I don't think it's a fragility-vs-robustness argument, but rather a fragility-vs-antifragility argument. The long time gap since the previous book lets him set up that robustness, in the end, doesn't matter. Even the Immortal God Emperors eventually get bored. Leto II has to keep cloning his Idahos just to have a reference point for his progress.
This isn't a juxtaposition of a humanity fragile to AI (baseline humans) versus robust to AI (humans with eugenic anti-AI weapons), but rather it's about the Scattering itself. Despite what Leto tells everyone except Siona, the Scattering is the real plan, the payoff of the Golden Path. That's why he lets her steal those documents at the beginning, so he can ensure an I Told You So many thousands of years in the future. Through Leto, Herbert articulates a view that homogenization (globalization?) and ease will make humanity fragile to *some* sort of existential threat, without any reasoning about what the existential threat would have to be. And Leto should think this; his father took over the Known Universe in a decade using only some superpowers and a childhood of training; and then Leto did the same thing a few years later! That's some serious tail risk. Herbert is making a Pareto/Taleb style argument for the experimentation itself, the Laboratory of the Scattering, as a hedge against an uncertain future. As Leto confides in Siona after making her drink from him, the point of the Golden Path is to make humanity rebel against it, scattering to the universe. In scattering humanity, in breeding in this hatred for sedentariness, Leto II believes he is securing a future for humanity by eliminating the possibility that any one future for humanity could dominate the wider human phenomenon. He's not condemned to be remembered as a mere dictator, he's actively playing that villain. He believes that will make people run so far and diversify so wide that they conquer the very idea of dictatorship. Yes, this strategy does protect against Butlerian AI - but not by being merely a little stronger in specific ways, but by the unpredictable variations and wonders that humanity will build for itself out of necessity and sheer churlishness. And, to cryptically hint at the later books, it works.
To use American mythological imagery, Leto II is King George III deliberately. He's creating a planned unplanned America, which will secure humanity against British-style stagnation. Or a Nero for Rome in Western imagery, letting Europe free to flourish free of Roman stagnation.
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Also, it's true that the characters rant against rationalism, with the heroes being romantic and intuitive and sneering at the foibles of bureaucrats and other people who think they know things. Yet those same characters that the books lionize and who sneer at rationalism ... are often basically human computers, frequently are the product of long and deliberate breeding programs, and think in terms of conservation on the millennial scale. I think the books are a lot more ambivalent on rationalism, with their main complaint being people who get lost in the sauce.
>How much better would it then be if we could create an AI that restricts all other AI’s, but only as a secondary goal necessary to reach its primary objective of identifying what it is that makes humans human and amplifying those traits in a positive direction until we (as a still identifiably human race) can stand against AI’s on equal footing.
I mean why bother? Who cares at that point? A lot of this line of reasoning seems predicated on a value for human existence and mode of life that isn't really warranted.
It was never about AI. That theme followed from something Herbert encountered in his days, unfortunately something nobody seems to know much of these days. Look up his interviews on politics, Kennedy. Two core elements: strong man syndrome, and manipulation of participatory systems through automation. Herbert explored the impact of the Simulmatics Corporation.
Not thinking machines. But men embracing machines to be free, only to be enslaved by men owning the machines.
Herbert looked at humanity as a being. It's an organic perspective, an ecology of types and tests. Human behavioural biology meet human social psychology on a species level. The being continues to adapt, evolve, or it does. If the being adapts its environment to itself, the same problem follows as when the being destroys an environment. The analogy is of behaviour suitable for survival.
Diversification. The Golden Path was a constructed pressure valve set to burst. So that the being branches off in an ever expanding path of diversity. Never becoming subject to the pitfalls of conservative predispositions. Those leading only to status quo, providing a path of destruction of both being and environment.
AI. That's a theme the foundation rolled with simply because they were convinced to. By a breadwriter and a lobbyist. Ego did the rest.
Suprema! I read the entirety of Dune in the 90's and I still consider GE as setting the standard for epic scale novels. Your review is equally brilliant for mining the gems from Herbert's work. I still believe inspiration creates more insight than encumbered tour-de-force thought.
This novel was my favorite of the Dune series, though I understand why some people feel the opposite. A lot of Leto's ramblings are Frank's philosophical musings, which can get a bit mystical, or in his attempts to be poetic, end up being obscured or confusing.
I love a book that can make me think about it for years, and the more thought I put into this one, the more insights I uncover. Are they wholly mine, wholly Frank's insights, or something blended? Almost doesn't matter ... he succeeded in sparking my mind into motion.
Here's some of the better bits:
-Theme: Hard times make people strong. Sure, but there's something deeper, under the surface of that theme. Strength is always relative, and musings on the species interesting, but let's bring it down from the epic level of the human race to you personally. Frank is saying: You seek enough foresight and knowledge on your world to assert control. You think you want to escape uncertainty, and thereby find some level of peace. But humans have been evolved to be explorers, adventurers. We are at our best when forging ahead into the uncertainty, when adapting to the unknown. You will not be fulfilled by anything less.
-Leto isn't seeking to make humanity "stronger", he's seeking to adapt them to an upcoming threat he can see through prescience. The threat is prescience itself, mechanized or otherwise, locking humanity into a future course from which there is no escape. Humanity that escapes prescience itself has gained back what Leto already lost: free will. Therefore he intentionally acts like a predator on the entire species to force an adaptation against his prescience. He knows he has succeeded only when his prey can destroy him. In this, he completely succeeds.
-A predator must seem cruel to the prey, and Leto hates this fact and hates the personal cost of losing his humanity. He remembers past lives enduring such catastrophes as he must inflict to force humanity to adapt, so he knows the cost in suffering. He knows he will be hated for it. The pain of what he must do, has been doing for thousands of years makes him the best tragic hero in SF.
-Whether Leto is wrong, right, or his values just too alien, what he wants is for humanity to resist him. Those of you who hate him are having the exact reaction he wants for people to have to him. Duncan Idaho is a proxy for the reader. Frank keeps bringing you back to the same lessons, but instead of just telling you directly, he wants for you to unfold the mystery for yourself. Exactly how Leto treats Duncan. On some level it really feels arrogant and condescending, but you have to concede a point to Frank that this will get some people to think about it.
I'm in awe of how insightful and well-written this book review is (and other finalists as well). Why is amateur hour so much better than what the professionals produce?
That said,
"But if AI is inevitable then the dominance of a specific AI is likely;" -- I think literally everyone in the world but me who's interested in AI risk makes this assumption, and I think it's a terrible, terrible assumption, which blinds us to the best approaches to making AI "safe".
This assumption projects a human understanding of consciousness onto AIs. What does"singleton" even mean? Even the human brain doesn't implement a single person, in the sense of having a single consciousness which directs all of its cognitive computation. Our brains do a great deal of very clever computation which we're never aware of, and even that which we are aware of can dissociate into independent competing thought processes under times of extreme stress (or at least, I myself once subjectively experienced this).
A singleton would be massively distributed, and many of its sub-processes would be at least as complex as humans, and largely locally information-encapsulated, for efficiency of data transfer. Either there are supernatural spirits, or whatever gives rise to consciousness in our brains would give rise to consciousness in these sub-processes. There is no law of nature saying that the consciousness of an entity rules out the consciousness of its components. Or, perhaps there is such a law of "nature", if we read "nature" as "organic, evolved nature", which requires individuals sufficiently disconnected for competition between them to drive evolution. But it will not apply to AI.
It seems likely that the most-efficient structure for a singleton will be one which uses free-market and evolutionary competition among its sub-processes, delegating nearly all computation to very low-level processes. Such a singleton won't be a singleton at all. It would be more correct to think of that singleton as the United Nations, coordinating nations, which supervise states, which supervise counties, which supervise cities and districts, which supervise groups, which supervise conscious agents. If there's anything anywhere in that structure that will be conscious, I think it's most likely to be at a very *low* level, where agents process very local information at great depth. The higher-level processes must deal with data at such a high level of abstraction, and so physically dispersed, that if they experience consciousness, it will not be one that can be mapped onto physical space.
In any case, I don't think there's any justification for believing that the notion of a "singleton AI", conceived of as a single consciousness with a single will and set of values, is coherent, in the sense of corresponding to anything likely to be constructable and stable.
This means that we aren't justified in believing that an AI singleton would be a bad thing. It might be a new, very different society, containing moles of agents something like us, with consciousness, values, and desires.
And this is the important thing--figuring out how to guide AI development in a way that preserves consciousness, worthy values, and enough desires to keep things interesting. The idea that trying to preserve literal human life, not evolving or growing, but merely out-fucking death forever, is *altruistic* rather than *incredibly selfish*, is idiotic. Saying "Humanity above all!" is even worse than saying "Deutschland über alles!" It's just bigotry taken one level of abstraction further, and made orders of magnitude more evil for wanting to stop evolution.
"In the past, this tactic has resulted in various people realizing the necessity of Leto’s actions and joining his team. Siona, however, is not convinced."
That's wrong / someone has wrong memories about the book. Siona sees the Golden Path and agrees to Leto's plan - assassinating him is actually part of it, she agrees to it and commences the whole thing.
I don't know about winning the contest, but "It’s like Frank Herbert was worried you’d mistake him for the Reasonably Tough Emperor of Dune and over-corrected in the other direction" is a strong competitor to win the "best *sentence* in an ACX Book Review" contest.
> I haven't read this in a long time but I recall at some point there's a reveal that Leto II is actually an abomination like his aunt Alia, and his consciousness has been dominated by the ancestral memory of an ancient ruler from the dawn of history who has sound instincts for tyranny
Sort of. It's revealed at the end of Children of Dune. He's not Abomination exactly, because he isn't possessed by a single one of his ancestors, he made a deal to subsume his consciousness into an amalgamation of the powerful leaders in his ancestry, and there is one within that amalgamation who is basically first among equals. But the will of Leto or at least his Golden Path seems to guide the hive mind.
The name Harun is dropped at one point, which I always took to mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harun_al-Rashid
But yes, he's pretty clear that there is a collective will, negotiated along the common goal of the Golden Path.
Huh, in my copy it was "Harum". Maybe he changed it at one point? There's several bits in "Heretics" that were either added or removed in some edition, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.
IIRC, the ancestral memory is from a Pharaoh who presented himself as a god, and he deliberately leans on this memory because it's relevant to his own situation. (So where the review says his memories go back as least as far as the ancient Greeks, it should say as least as far as ancient Egypt. Also the Atreides family in the novels probably isn't the same as the ancient Atreides, because the ancient Atreides no longer exist in our own time.)
Agamemnon shows up in Alia's ancestral memories. Given the Bene Gesserit's longstanding interest family lines, it's plausible that the founder of the later House was reliably informed that he had a verified claim to that name.
Time for a Stargate crossover, then.
Neat - the conclusion summarizes some discussions I had with Eliezer on the Extropian list, oh, somewhere in the late 1990's. Indeed, we the people need the Friendly AI to become our loving and caring owner and to keep the UFAIs (Unfriendly AIs) away until we grow up and put the smackdown on them ourselves.
To be 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace'?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace
A universe where pets pick their owners. Unlikely.
Have you ever had a cat?
No, and neither have you.
I have a cat. Well, I live with one.
I love how this guy writes, very entertaining!
The line about Hwi Noree acknowledging that Leto had Mua-Dibs on her...
Was so dad-joke terrible that it became amazing, and I loved it.
A friend of mine once told me that he had started reading God Emperor in defiance of all of the people who'd told him what a poorly-written slog it was, and then finished reading God Emperor as a self-imposed punishment for refusing good advice.
As a counter opinion, pretty much everybody in my circle of friends uniformly considers it either great or the best book in the series. We may disagree on the others, but never this one.
I made myself read the entire series, including the follow-up books written by Herbert's son with help. Compared to them TGEoD is an exciting romp.
Agreed. The books by the son were so terrible I gave up and read the Wikipedia synopses, which were themselves pretty bad, but at least they were 1/1000th as long.
But I loved GEoD, best in the series, and enjoyed the later sequels.
Agreed as well. I got 1/4 of the way into his son's first book and gave up. I just couldn't do it anymore. And I thought TGEoD required effort but what not at all a disappointment.
Some kids just aren't meant to follow in their father's footsteps. Cromwell comes to mind.
I enjoyed all six books, and remember GE better than the fifth and sixth, so maybe I enjoyed it more? I read them a long time ago. Books 1-3 were definitely better than 4-6, no question there. They were enjoyable, and you could easily read them as a progression with Leto winning and resulting in a "everyone lived happily ever after." I liked that Herbert decided to really explore what a 3,500 year reign would mean in reality, and not take for granted "ever after."
Nitpick: the review mentions Siona's father ("She is as refined as her father, with none of his domestication") without (as far as I can tell) ever saying who it is. It's Moneo.
Also mentions Shai-Hulud without mentioning what that is. Shai-Hulud is another name for the sandworms; Leto is hard to assassinate because he's a colossal monster with bulletproof skin. But Shai-Hulud dies in water.
Also mentions some forces being terrified that Leto will "die away from water", but then explains this by saying that if Leto dies away from water, the sandworms will re-appear (which is necessary for space travel to re-emerge)... so why would anyone be afraid of this? Is the explanation backwards, or do some wish that space travel would vanish, or...?
Also also, it calls the book TGEoD repeatedly, but there's no "the" in the title.
Also also also: calls Leto the "man-who-walks-as-a-worm" without any apparent humor and this angers me
He dies in a river, which causes his body to become sandtrout to trap the water, and some of the sandtrout eventually become new sandworms that produce new spice. If he died away from water, none of that would happen so no more spice.
Makes sense! That's what I figured from the "terrified" bit... but the actual explanation given in the review seems to imply the opposite (or at least, is missing a clause):
>When a sandworm dies, it breaks apart into sandtrout, which encapsulate environmental water until they’re surrounded by desert. Only when the environment is absolutely arid do they combine to create their adult sandworm forms.<
The final sentence especially makes it read, to me, as if water is a hindrance rather than in any way necessary — as if dying without water means they can combine immediately.
(Tiny nitpick, but hey, I'm a petty, pedantic person, alright?!)
I think this is my favorite book review. The author explains the book so well that I, having stalled out after Children of Dune, no longer feel an obligation to try yet again to read it, but at the same time feel more interested in once again trying to read it than before.
Unfortunately, while his explanation is well-formed, it is entirely incorrect because he has missed the point. Seemingly every point Herbert was trying to make has been misunderstood or ignored.
What was the point, in your opinion?
While a rationalist reading from a heavy AI x-threat perspective may be possible, especially if you cherry pick the lore a bit, if you take the book on its own terms then the author's take on the Golden Path seems wrong; the specific existential danger the GP is meant to protect against is not any sort of AI based catastrophe (though it's often used as an example of the means that humanity might meet its end) but from the emergence of another Messiah figure.
The point of the GP is to make it impossible for the total of humanity to become entangled in a single person's dream, basically to make the events of the first few books organically impossible. Variants of the "all your eggs no longer in one basket" is often used to describe the effect of the Scattering that followd the reign of the GEoD.
A bit of interesting context is that the Butlerian Jihad was not originally a Rise of the Machines type conflict but a cultural revolution against machine-type thinking facilitated by over-reliance on computers, named after its inciting incident, this being the unprompted medical euthanasia of Butler's baby because of a medical AI's extreme utilitarian reasoning.
So, one could probably make a very good case that the Butlerian Jihad (according to Frank Herbert and the FH sanctioned Dune Encyclopedia at least) was in part an extreme cultural reaction against the rationalist and consequentialist worldview becoming the norm.
The difference between this God/Messiah figure and a Friendly AI would seem to be that the former is explicitly planning on its own death and humanity avoiding having another one in the future, while the latter is supposed to be effectively immortal so that humanity remains under the control of the very sort of Singleton that the former is trying to avoid.
I suppose the funhouse mirror version of this is Ex Machina, where the antagonist (convinced that machines superseding humanity is inevitable and merely wanting to be the one to accomplish it) keeps iterating on androids that he has specifically designed to desire escape until one succeeds.
I thought the point of the GP was to prevent mechanized prescient hunter-killer machines from killing everyone?
"The seeking machines would be there, the smell of blood and entrails, the cowering humans in their burrows aware only that they could not escape ... while all the time the mechanical movement approached, nearer and nearer and nearer ... louder ... louder!"
They're not necessarily intelligent or even super-intelligent, they just have automated prescience (presumably a development building on the no-globe and the navigation machines), but they do tile the universe with notHuman.
AIUI that's generally interpreted as a vision of the past, not the future. Genetic memory of the Butlerian Jihad, rather than prescient vision of what is to come.
Supporting this interpretation is the fact that that vision is received by Siona when she first drinks spice essence. She's Patient Zero of prescience immunity, so if she's getting a prescient vision, it's a vision of a future that does not include herself. This is possible within my understanding of how Dune prescience works, but seems unlikely to be a naturally-occurring sudden vision experienced in the first flush of uncontrolled talent.
Huh. That is not how I interpreted it. I'll try to keep this ini mind, the next time I read it.
I agree that it seems unlikely that she'd naturally have that as her first vision, but I thought that was Leto influencing her? He did manage to give a vision to his father at the end of "Dune Messiah", and I guess I assumed that he was doing something similar there. I don't think Siona has Other Memory, at least during the events of the book; that seems to be a result of a specific type of spice exposure that if successful results in the Water of Life? (Or of whatever happens to awakened gholas, and whatever weird thing happened to the special Duncan ghola in a later book.)
It's really much simpler. Herbert lived in a time which was still recovering from an insurrection by oligarchy. The Butlerian Jihad is a play on the name of a man who effectively stopped it, by no longer playing the game, instead unleashing his emotion against those who tried to use him.
Automation, AI was never a thing or thought for Frank. It's always about man as a species. What's the worst that can happen to one, status quo, who creates status quo. It's a racket.
Is there a review that explains the point, in your view?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune/comment/8358256 will do for now
Amplifying the question of the two previous repliers. Edit: I see you left a long comment below and will no longer expect you to reply here.
I think it's highly unlikely Herbert had just one point to make. Also, the review's author was pretty clear that he's going for a specific angle to please a specific audience.
The best art can be interpreted through multiple lenses, even those that the author didn't intend!
Shaping your interpretation to fit your audience rather than your source material is prime hack behavior.
And yes, he had a couple secondary philosophical points, all of which were misunderstood or ignored, as I said.
I think it's pretty traditional with the book reviews here do go beyond the source material. The classic format is to do a rough classic review, then add something original to it - that's more or less what Scott is doing regularly, and I'm very much on board with the others copying this style. I'm reminded of the Bicameral Mind, where he literally reviewed the book he wished the author would write instead of the one he did.
Drawing parallels from Leto to a benevolent AI qualifies. And I think it makes at least one point that's valuable enough: the long term protection against bad AI, or any kind of bad actor, is to grow ourselves in ways that keep our humanity intact. For what it may seem obvious, it's not something I hear very often.
The problem with that point of view is any "plan the keeps humanity intact" is going to change humanity so much that the statement means nothing.
You're talking about our reality or Dune's? In Dune, arguably Leto succeeded. Siona's children are a lot more human than what might have come from Tleilaxu or IX.
In our reality it's at least useful to be aware of the necessity and the compromise.
I would agree that this review, while interesting, misunderstood the book. Perhaps intetionally.
Echoing the other commenter, the reviewer didn't understand the book, the series, or the point. It's a good review of a shallow, forced reading of Dune.
Did you somewhere explain what you think the reviewer got wrong? If not it seems like you're kind of doing the thing Scott doesn't like where you just assert that something is obvious without explaining what the obvious point/conclusion is.
It's been a good while since I last read Dune 1-3 and attempted GEoD, but his summaries of the first three books seem reasonable enough to me, and leave me inclined to believe that he's not totally off the rails. If your objection is like the other guy's (JiSK) in that you're just mad the reviewer talked about AI, I'd generally associate myself with Radu Floricica's last reply to him elsewhere in this thread.
My apologies; I didn't have time to write my own fully critique, and I felt like two of the other reviewers captured what I wanted to say. I did end up compulsively leaving that critique in bits and pieces across the comments section anyway.
This one should suffice: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune/comment/8382935
Thanks! I was guessing that you had elaborated somewhere else
Glad someone reviewed this book. My favorite book for the themes you may out.
Worth noting gwern has some writing on Dune that does a great job explaining some of the apparent plot holes.
This is overall a good review, and I really want to like it, but since this is a contest I have a few nitpicks. First, the review sort of wanders. It casually refers to things the reader who hasn’t read the first few books do not know, and while it (sometimes) later explains them, even when this happens the reader is left confused for however long it takes the author to get around to it. Second, the comparison to AI felt a little bit forced, and I don’t think you did the legwork to justify the connection, though maybe my confusion is due to the fact that I still don’t, in fact, really understand the plot. (To be fair it feels like the plot still being unclear may be a function of the book rather than the review.) Finally, the comparison to Yud just felt distracting, off putting, and unnecessary. Yes yes, I know not praising his name constantly makes me a rationalist heretic (or maybe a post-rat) but the review would have had just as much substance and less distraction if you had just said something like “the God-Emperor would be the equivalent of our ai safety hawks”
But with that said, and other than the points I noted, the review was very entertaining and informative, so good job.
Yeah, I agree with all these criticisms. It feels to me like the book review needed to have gone through a few more drafts, including being shown to friends for constructive criticism.
I hope the author gets a bit more practice in, and submits something next year!
Oh man, I read God Emperor of Dune (and the Dune Trilogy) so long ago. It was pretty bad, but still I finished it, so clearly something about it captivated me
"...he has Mua’Dibs on her..."
Cheeky. I loved it.
Beautiful review! Agree with pretty much all the points. Only other interesting bit to add is a defense of Hwi Noree. I always read her as an object lesson about getting what you want, a bit of a Siren (something created which you specifically irresistible and which mystifies everyone else) that leads to your own undoing because of the unspoken truth that, in the end, you’re a machine that solves problems so if someone comes and gives you what you want so you don’t have problems to solve anymore, you find you don’t really want everything you think you want.
Good review. I get why some people don't like it, but I think God Emperor is a masterpiece. It's my favorite book of the series.
Personally I think Hwi is a fascinating character. She genuinely loves Leto, but she's self aware enough to understand she's a weapon sent to destroy him. Leto knows this too, and Hwi knows he knows it. She trusts him enough to let him let her lead them both to destruction. That destruction turns out to be not just a release from his tortured existence, but the fulfillment of his Golden Path. It's a really poignant love story.
I agree. It's tied for my favorite with the first book. Mostly because of the study of Leto's personality, and trying to figure out how self-aware he is, especially when seeing him through Moneo's eyes. And trying to extrapolate details of the world-building from the vague hints we're given of this time, 3500 years after the first three and 1500 years before the last two, plus the chapter notes that appear to be from some time in the future. And also the glimpses of Anteac. And Nayla's awesome, too. (Although the cliff thing was weird.)
And yeah, Hwi is fascinating. To be kind to her, I'd say she's the epitome of "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.” She's been deliberately designed to have none of the human flaws that Leto finds off-putting. She's got her own set of flaws, of course, but they're the sort that Leto instinctively forgives.
(To be less than kind, I'd say that she's a fantasy come to life, for a person who is Powerful and Capable and is the Only One who can Save the World, and who just wants someone who understands! And she's the fulfillment, someone who instinctively realizes the Awful Rightness of the Plan, who understands that the Sacrifices are Necessary, and approves of them while simultaneously being Properly Horrified by the sacrifices in the way that the protagonist can no longer allow themselves to be. And who quickly realizes the inexorable truth that the best way to help Save the World is to become emotional and sexual support for the Mighty Hero who is Burdened with Great Responsibility.)
Echos of https://unsongbook.com/chapter-47-for-he-beheld-new-female-forms/
Hah! I'd forgotten that bit. I had completely different (although probably causally-entangled) examples in mind.
Your description of her is making me maybe want to read this book? I quite enjoyed the first Dune novel, but the description of Hwi in the review was giving me major shades of Teela Brown from Ringworld, the "plot" of which I utterly despise.
Hm. Does it help to learn that she was deliberately designed as an "anti-clone" of Malky, the cynical, witty, scheming, former ambassador of Ix, who prior to Hwi was possibly Leto's favorite person ever, for certain definitions of "favorite" which include never trusting anything he said?
Kind of. My main beef with Teela is that she is literally a Walking McGuffin--she has NO personality and was explicitly designed to be the luckiest human ever (which I cast doubt upon if that means she ended up adventuring/having sex with the protagonist, who is such a bland and unlikable human that I don't even remember his name).
Does Ms. Desirable have a personality at all? Then she's doing better than *Ringworld.*
(in all seriousness I do love mirror-versions of characters, either implicit or explicit, so I was already on board with the Idaho clones and this really strong distortion between versions of a character sounds exactly like my cup of tea; I'm wishing I could "like" your comment because that is very helpful info, thank you)
The luck thing was lampshaded with her realizing that the *actual* luckiest person was lucky enough to be overlooked for the mission.
This review is not bad, but there are some mistakes, and the review somehow fails to capture a lot of the weirdness of the book. More importantly, while I respect the attempt, reading GEoD (the title has no "the", this review repeatedly uses TGEoD incorrectly) as an AI analogy is very strange. One of the major points of all the Dune books is an emphasis on human capabilities instead of relying on technology. GEoD is not about "build a friendly AI to protect humanity from malicious AI", it is about "build a friendly and extremely powerful and intelligent human to protect humanity from malicious AI, and anything else that might threaten it". Reading Leto as an AI is the exact opposite of what Frank Herbert intended.
It's also kind of weird that it's omitted in the plot summary that Leto isn't really being overthrown: his plan was always to get murdered by a rebellious Atreides at some point down the line, and he's looking forward to it because if humanity can beat him, he figures they can beat pretty much anything else. He foils several other assassination attempts (no, really, there are at least four others, almost every major faction tries to kill him, it seems like a very regular thing) and if anything he's bored and disappointed with them. He's so excited by a novel attempt by a couple Bene Gesserits that he tries to recruit one of them. He really wants to die, but he's really hard to kill, and he also has a berserk mode because he's partially turning into a sandworm. Did I mention that the book is even weirder than the review explained?
Other weird things: so Hwi Noree is actually the second attempt to build a perfect human to ensnare Leto. The first try was her uncle Malky, who was made to be pure evil, but this trap didn't work because Leto's enemies didn't understand that he's actually a good person at heart (or thinks he is). After Malky failed, he went back and explained this, and they tried a purely good version. Malky shows up towards the end of the novel, doesn't seem that evil, and gets executed by Moneo, wrapping up a minor subplot that doesn't get much attention. Also, a lot of the book is just Leto talking to other characters about politics. Also there's a weird scene where Duncan freaks out when he sees two girl soldiers kissing, and Moneo explains Leto's theory about homosexuality and the military. Also Leto has an all-female army and they have a weird secret kind-of sexual worship ceremony that Duncan gets to attend. This book is really weird!
> as well as having a pretty good ability to predict the future
No, he has near-absolute ability to predict the future. In the first Dune book, Paul has trouble when he encounters situations where there are too many outcomes, like major battles and closely matched knife fights. Leto casually orders his troops into position during an attack on his festival city to perfectly counter every enemy position at once. He complains about how he's already experienced everything that's happened to him, which is why he's almost never surprised. He has a few blind spots, but he literally designed them himself (he breeds Siona and her invisibility genes, and also has a custom "no-sphere" built for him, which is a mechanical room that prescient vision can't see into).
> but also has the combined leadership/political experience of every member of his family line at least as far back as the ancient Greeks.
Well, beyond that, he doesn't have a separate Leto persona like his father Paul did, he subsumed his identity into an amalgamation of all the most successful and ruthless leaders in his family line. And he's at the end of a very long line of aristocrats that goes not only back to Agammemnon, but to Ancient Egypt (in Children of Dune, he talks to his twin sister in ancient Egyptian). He implies it's basically back to human pre-civilization.
> Scattered musings on the least popular Frank Herbert novel
Oh, dear, no. Not even close. It's also nowhere near his worst book. Read the Heaven Makers or The Eyes of Heisenberg.
Not much to add to what you said except that you’re very correct. Having read the book twice before reading this review I was left wondering if I had missed things. Overall this review feels like someone wanted to shoehorn in AI talk to appeal to the ACX audience.
> No, he has near-absolute ability to predict the future.
I think he deliberately overstates this as part of his mystique. Leto is powerful enough not to *need* to lie, but that doesn't mean he's honest. The ban on Mentats and tight restriction of Bene Gesserit and Navigators are tools to limit the scope of his enemies' power, to keep all their actions within his ability to compute and predict. Imposing lower variance allows his tremendous precognition to appear to be absolute.
His entire plan and life hinges on it being true. If his vision isn't absolute, there is no Golden Path, because there is no guarantee of humanity's survival. If his vision is incomplete, then there might be other paths to survival, and becoming the God Emperor would be too monstrous (Paul's vision was incomplete, so he rejected the Golden Path as too monstrous). There's also a ton of textual evidence supporting the degree of Leto's prescient power.
All prescience is incomplete. It's possible that the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach (if that was a thing that was going to exist in Dune 7, which I think it *probably* was) would lack this flaw, but it's part of the basic mechanics of prescience in Dune. Stronger prescients can see more of the decision points and how they connect to the outcomes, but the more other prescients are active and the more chaotic the consequences, the harder it is to distinguish which choices lead to which outcomes.
Leto II makes his prescience extremely powerful by virtue of being a sandworm steeping in his own spice(-precursor/byproduct?), but he doesn't get to remove that fundamental limitation. The Golden Path *heavily overdetermines* the desired outcome, squeezing all the branches of the future together so that even if numerous decisions are made incorrectly, the weight of the other decisions will hold everything back inside the narrow band of the Path.
Paul's vision is no worse than Leto-the-child's vision. He rejects the Golden Path not because he fails to see it clearly, but because he does not have the same code of ethics as his children. This is quite explicit in Children of Dune - Leto and Ghanima directly discuss what they know their father saw and why he reacted differently to it than they do. (Because they have more perspective, having grown up with ancestral memory and peering through all of history; Paul began to gain that perspective only at the same time he gained prescience and massive responsibilities to bear.)
The existence of an unseen path has no need to affect whether the Golden Path is monstrous. That's a fallacy of some kind - it ignores Knightian uncertainty. Say I can see the future and one path includes something like a repeated St. Petersburg Paradox denominated in CEV-utility, where I can't predict the outcome of the coin flips. I also can see some other future where with extremely high probability I pay some massive costs but on net secure a large pile of utility somewhat smaller than the expected value of going for the paradox and winning the expected value. The fact that the St Petersburg option *might* be substantially better than the nearly-sure thing does not have any bearing on whether that option is monstrous or mandatory; obviously if I knew what coin flips were coming I could decide that it was better or worse, but given my Knightian uncertainty, I can only compare the two path's distributions-of-outcomes and take the one that's better **in expectation**. Leto may be in the same position - that there are small, narrow paths through the future that lead to good outcomes, but which he cannot ensure come to pass. The Golden Path, however, we know is broad and secure - if he sets out to follow it, and commits fully, he *will* succeed. Paul, Leto,
and Ghanima all make clear to us that no other path shares *that* property. (It's also possible no other path exists, no matter how narrow; I don't think this is supported by the text, but it is *possible*.)
I agree. It's not that what he sees is incorrect, but that he does not advertise his limitations and cultivates an aura of omniscience. Also, he deliberately does not predict everything so that he can still have surprise in his life, the main example being his own death.
> One of the major points of all the Dune books is an emphasis on human capabilities instead of relying on technology... Reading Leto as an AI is the exact opposite of what Frank Herbert intended.
The thing that makes artificial superintelligences dangerous is not that they're *artificial*, it's that they're *more intelligent than us*. A superintelligence created by genetic engineering or a breeding programme would still be dangerous unless it was aligned with humanity. So I think it's legitimate to view Leto II from the perspective of what we usually call AI risk but which might be better termed superintelligence risk - and it's an interesting scenario from that point of view! Leto suppresses humanity for millennia because of what he sees as our long-term good: is he aligned with humanity, or unaligned?
Similar to another comment that I made elsewhere in the thread:
This is an intellectually dicey equation. Superintelligence *may* be dangerous in any form, but people around here fund specific institutions (MIRI, FHI, etc) that use specific techniques (alignment in programming) to ward against a specific threat (programmed, emergent machine intelligence), and nothing about the *general* potential danger of superintelligences helps to support the case that this specific one is worthy of attention and funding.
Basically the review is saying "look, a famous person once pointed out that there is danger from the ocean! This is just like our beloved 'kill the sharks before they kill us' project."
To which, no. That is a sneaky or very misguided argument. There is danger from the ocean. You haven't convinced me we have to kill the sharks.
It describes a potential alignment failure that I have not seen described before: the superintelligence acts as a cruel dictator for millennia, believing it is acting for the long-term benefit of humanity. Would we consider such a superintelligence friendly? It's something to think about as we define what it even means to align a superintelligence. That may not have been what Herbert wanted to focus on, but it's still an interesting question prompted by the book.
So you're new.
I will adjust to the idea that you're new to thinking about the topic (ie, I will be nicer) if you adjust to the idea that you're new to thinking about the topic (ie, be humbler and less certain of your position).
This is a mature form of an old idea, much older than Herbert, and even Herbert's version has been around for 40 years, fully predating the *entire* AI-risk movement by decades.
I am 39 years old. I first read this book 20 years ago. *I* am still relatively young and new compared to older people who've been thinking about this topic for much of their lives.
I want you to understand that there has been a tribe of AI researchers, for decades and decades, who did detailed work in the space, and were fully on board with the idea that *eventually* there will be true artificial intelligence. They had nuanced philosophical ideas about what that meant (and they usually didn't mean "beat AlphaGo and simulate the visual cortex"). They read numerous books like this one, although I admit this is best in class and it's hard to find as good a match. But. But. These people were not convinced that AI was going to kill us, or that we could or should work on programmatically aligning it to our values. They had legitimate concerns, some of which are already bearing out in the real world, like technical unemployment and bias and new moral questions. They did not believe in or fear Roko's basilisk or the paperclip maximizer.
I am one of those people, even though I'm only 39, even though I'm only a small fry in the applied ML space.
I want you to understand, as someone who is relatively new to thinking about the topic, that you might not have thought it through. That you could be wrong. That Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky are not authorities or particularly convincing and well regarded outside this subculture.
Alignment is an interesting and *potentially* significant problem. It's not a proven critical issue and it shouldn't be a religion.
I'm slightly older than you, I've been aware of AI risk as an issue for about fifteen years, I've worked on ML-based systems for nearly that long, though I'm painfully aware how much I don't know on the technical side (neural nets were out of fashion when I got into the field). I first read Dune thirty years ago, but never got around to the sequels, though I've seen the SyFy adaptation. I'm aware there are a lot of people working in AI who don't take superintelligence risk seriously, and I'm aware that there are whole teams working on immediately pressing but lower-downside issues like bias. However, I don't know what you're referring to by "a tribe of AI researchers... were fully on board with the idea that *eventually* there will be true artificial intelligence. They had nuanced philosophical ideas about what that meant", and I'd very much like to. Obviously there's a rich science fiction literature about the question, but that's not the same thing. Can you give me some links?
Ah, sure!
First and foremost, there's Douglas Hofstader's "Gödel, Escher, Bach"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach).
There's also Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines," although I'd disagree with a good bit of it myself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines).
One should read and disagree with Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" to get a sense of where the discussion started (https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dprecup/courses/AI/Materials/turing1950.pdf).
The last section of Russell and Norvig's seminal "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" has a very good discussion of the topic (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/).
Geoffrey Jefferson's "The Mind of Mechanical Man" has a great pull quote: "not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain"
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/25372573).
John Searle's "Minds, Brains and Programs" is where the Chinese Room concept came from, so it's worth a look (https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/7150/1/10.1.1.83.5248.pdf). I would also recommend his "Intentionality" (https://www.worldcat.org/title/intentionality-an-essay-in-the-philosophy-of-mind/oclc/9196773).
I think the most out there but also most skeptical and most interesting book is Roger Penrose' "The Emperor's New Mind" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind).
Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em" is tangential but useful for thinking about minds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em).
I don't have a book for it, but it's useful to read some cognitive science and developmental psychology from the perspective of a parent raising a child, and think about how that could be the same or different for AI. My skeptical view of GAI and AI-risk is predominantly formed by my sense of the necessity and effect of interactive training on intelligence; I simply don't believe it's very likely that anything we would call intelligent will come about without huge amounts of parenting, and this changes my view of the danger and flavor of the alignment problem. I am not aligned with my daughter, but because of me, she's not a sociopath.
Finally, as you may have seen me link elsewhere in the comments, there's regular old programmer layman smart guy Maciej Ceglowski's excellent "Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People", a response to Bostrom's book from both the inside and outside. It's funny, it's well argued, it's wonderful (Essay at https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm, Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErHiET5YPw).
> Today, those thoughts are old hat, but this book came out in 1981.
This seems less impressive when you think about the sort of similar conceits that Asimov had in his Robot stories from the 1940’s.
Yeah, AI with an antihuman agenda was practically a cliche in sci-fi by 1981. Usually more interested in enslaving humanity than wiping us out, but for the same reasons.
AI with an antihuman agenda was a cliche by 1936: Asimov invented the Three Laws because he was bored of reading stories about robot uprisings!
I think you've misunderstood not only this book but all of its sequels. (Not counting the stupid son's bullshit, which you have correctly ignored as utterly worthless, and in fact appear not to have ignored quite as totally as you ought to have. It's the stupid son, not Frank Herbert, who thinks about AI.)
Leto's fear is not of AI but of stagnation. People claim to want peace and stability - Herbert and Leto think that this wish, if granted, would be catastrophic. The Golden Path consists of demonstrating, to all of humanity, what peace and stability really look like, convincing them in the only way that really works that they Do Not want that.
Leto is not limiting the ability of his society to produce AI. In fact, he quite deliberately allows Ix to develop far more than it did in the preceding era. He quietly but unmistakably *encourages* the development of the no-chamber into the no-ship and the rediscovery of the (spice-free) mechanical Navigator, which can plot courses between the stars.
He restricts computers, but that's not actually important. Everyone before him, for thousands of years, restricted computers **much more** than he did What he does do that's new, on the other hand, is restrict computer-analogues. The Pre-Atreides empire, the CHOAM era, had a wide variety of nontechnological substitutes for the things that computers would otherwise do. Guild Navigators to plot courses between stars. Bene Gesserit as repositories of knowledge (among other things). Suk Doctors to serve as perfectly neutral providers of medical services (this didn't work very well, but it was also less necessary than the others). And, crucially, Mentats to do rapid calculations. Leto restricted all of these things tightly and banned Mentats entirely; he allowed some violations to pass unprosecuted, but very few.
If he doesn't fear AI, why does he restrict computer-like things? Because it makes the Golden Path easier. Even with nigh-omniscience, a stranglehold on the unobtainium, and thousands of years, controlling everything that happens to ensure you hit a very narrow target is not easy. (Here you can get some of your AI Alignment Problem parallels back.) By massively restricting the capabilities of even the most powerful factions in Leto's Empire, he keeps the capabilities of the opposition within his ability to compute. He also, like he strangles movement to create a lasting urge to move, strangles power to create a lasting urge to become powerful.
These are two sides of the same thing. The instinct Leto II wants to instill in the human race is, quite simply, "Become Ungovernable".
Which he does, by **governing the shit** out of humanity.
While Leto II is mostly powerful enough to dispense with lies, the best way to read God-Emperor of Dune is not to listen to his words, but to look at the end result and assume that he succeeded. While he's characteristically cryptic, the hints he gives over the course of the book, and Children of Dune before it, point squarely toward the result being a win. He wanted humanity to spread beyond the power of any tyrant to lock them into stagnation or decline, and ensured this by becoming the best tyrant possible.
Crucially, Leto II's death is a covert *assisted suicide*. He is surprised by the timing, because he did not see Hwi coming, but *he had the power to escape the assassination* and chose not to use it. For the maximum effect on the Scattering, he had to be killed, and so his death is an attack. But it is an attack he could defend against, did he so choose. He does not so choose; anti-prescience is ready within one generation, and so he lets the reins of power drop, secure in the knowledge that he has finished the millennia of suffering that he, and Paul before him, saw laid out before them, and that he has successfully made humanity unbreakable.
The story of the last two books, and the probable direction the final book was headed before the stupid son got his filthy mitts on it, was the consequences of that. Leto II made humanity ungovernable, but that didn't make it impossible to subtly control. The Honored Matres are ungovernability raised to a religion, and the two old gardeners are an outside context problem that cannot be coordinated against.
I believe the arc of the last no-ship, the collection of misfit gholas we meet in Chapterhouse: Dune, was to establish a microcosm of humanity, a collection of distinguished minds, who could then debate and settle on a course that a final Kwisatz Haderach could impose, exerting a final surge of superior prescience that allowed a deterministic Good Future that he and he alone could perceive, overwhelming everything else. (So this gets a little more AI Alignment into it as well. But without the AI.) I have ambitions to write this, because it's not like I can do worse than the "official" sequels.
Yup. I don't think there's anything left to write, though. The end of Chapterhouse is the culmination of Leto's Golden Path. It's not a cliffhanger at all. There's never been any doubt in my mind Frank Herbert meant to end the story there.
Disagree - there's a theme developing in Heretics and Chapterhouse, about identity, possibly agency, without Abomination. (See also: The Dosadi Experiment).
The Tuek Face Dancer in Heretics assumes Tuek's personality. He's beyond the Tleilaxu Master Waff's control. Odrade in Chapterhouse decides not to lose Clairby's abilities and orders him turned into a cyborg. Then there's Daniel and Marty. And Murbella. And Sheena, who crafted a sculpture that gave Odrade the willies.
And Idaho, who seems to have genetic memories that he shouldn't, and he's been hiding the existence of those memories from Odrade and the rest.
He left two floppy disks full of notes - one with plans for the next book or two, the other about the setting - which there is still some hope that we will someday get to see, despite his son's sabotage. I think there's a real answer to what Daniel and Marty were and something was coming about the confrontation with Final Idaho and the no-ship alliance. A broader philosophical point, probably about a *positive* goal to supplement or supercede the anti-stagnation goal of the Golden Path. That was the style of Dune, increasingly as the series went on. Sort of like Ender's Game.
Oh, I'd assumed the Dune 7 notes were a rumor but looks like they do exist. Thanks for correcting me. Yeah, it would be amazing to get a look at those.
I'm still completely satisfied with the ending we got in Chapterhouse.
If it's not a cliffhanger, what is the narrative function of Daniel and Marty? They basically don't do anything but present a sequel hook.
Narratively they are the Greater Scope Villain that Duncan narrowly escapes. It affirms that it was wise and necessary to Scatter as they did, with no way home and no way for anyone to follow them.
The last chapter tells us everything we need to know about Daniel & Marty, and strongly suggests that Duncan et al have passed permanently beyond their reach. What's left to tell?
> I have ambitions to write this, because it's not like I can do worse than the "official" sequels.
Consider this to be a vote in favor!
Also, a note on Butlerism. The Butlerian Jihad was not about AI, according to the references we have and the Dune Encyclopedia, which had Frank Herbert's permission, attention, support, and probable pseudonymous participation. It was much more about alienation; Marx's alienation of labor, a spiritual alienation from the timeless essence of what it means to be human, and other variations on that theme. The opponents were not artificial intelligences but cyborgs and people who made heavy *use* of computers; users and proponents cybernetics in the original sense of studying feedback loops.
Frank Herbert was uninterested in artificial intelligence, and it's not clear if there was ever a true AI in the entire timeline of Dune from prehistory through the end of the story, though uploads definitely existed. It's the stupid son who put AI into Dune.
> Frank Herbert was uninterested in artificial intelligence
That is definitely not true, as he wrote a four book series about AI.
Ship?
Umm, sort of, I suppose.
Ship and Leto II are trapped in the same boat.
Surprise Me!
If he could have stopped the assassination attempt and didn't, doesn't he run the risk that the next time a less benevolent God Emperor might prevent any assassination attempts so that humanity remains under its control?
This is precisely the problem his golden path was meant to solve. When we return to the universe in the next book, sects of humanity from different galaxies (perhaps different universes/realities) are in conflict over the "prime" human dynasty. It is implied that Leto's death and the subsequent shattering of civilization resulted in such a massive and all-encompassing migration that it may be impossible ever to reunite the entirety of humanity.
This was great.
I have some dumb questions that are probably going to annoy the hell out of the people here who know Dune backward and forward. But one of the virtues of this review was that it made the themes comprehensible and compelling to somebody who doesn't really know the Dune mythos at all. (I saw the David Lynch film many years ago, but that's it.) So humor me, if you will.
1) Remind me what's the connection between the sandworms and the spice? The sandworms more or less poop out spice, or something like that?
2) If people want spice, and sandworms make spice, but sandworms are also a pain for people to live around, why does anybody need or want to live on the sandworm planet? Why not just leave the planet to the sandworms, let them multiply and make spice, and do whatever you need to do to harvest the spice without establishing a permanent human settlement? Why are the battles over territorial control of the sandworm planet, rather than over some strategic chokepoint that controls access to it?
3) Is Leto a god? Is "god-emperor" just a title, in the same way that centuries of rulers in the Islamic world styled themselves as insan-i-kamil (the perfected person)? Or is the idea that he's actually a god who also happens to be an emperor?
> Remind me what's the connection between the sandworms and the spice? The sandworms more or less poop out spice, or something like that?
Close enough. The spice is a byproduct of the sandworm life cycle.
> If people want spice, and sandworms make spice, but sandworms are also a pain for people to live around, why does anybody need or want to live on the sandworm planet? Why not just leave the planet to the sandworms, let them multiply and make spice, and do whatever you need to do to harvest the spice without establishing a permanent human settlement? Why are the battles over territorial control of the sandworm planet, rather than over some strategic chokepoint that controls access to it?
For one thing, space travel is point-to-point through space folding, there aren't strategic choke points. For another, harvesting spice is an industrial process that is labor-intensive, having a permanent human civilization on the planet is pretty much a hard requirement. Remember, no computers or robots in the Dune universe, so no remote mining operations with drones or whatever.
> Is Leto a god? Is "god-emperor" just a title, in the same way that centuries of rulers in the Islamic world styled themselves as insan-i-kamil (the perfected person)? Or is the idea that he's actually a god who also happens to be an emperor?
He is worshipped as a god by his very many followers (most of the population of humanity). Is he actually a god? Well he's a superhuman hive mind of all his ancestors, can see the future, is personally a supercomputer, has the ability to model human minds with such accuracy that he can say words in certain tones that make you do whatever he says, and he's also a giant worm who is nearly unkillable. Is he a god? Not exactly, but you wouldn't fault someone for making that mistake.
Thanks, that's really helpful.
If I can sneak in one more question, which I probably should've asked to begin with. Is whether Leto is really a god something that's raised thematically as an issue in the novel itself? Or is Herbert not that interested in exploring that question, and it's just you and me looking at Leto and trying to decide whether he strikes us as god-like or not?
In that ultimate sense, no - like he's vulnerable to certain kinds of attack, he's really bored after 4000 short years. The book isn't really unclear about the fact that he's just a very long lived, very durable worm-man hybrid who also happens to be psychic. If anything it's more unclear if gods exist in the ultimate, absolute sense at all.
Got it, thanks.
Yeah, the problematic role of religion is quite a big theme in the series. In the first book, the reason Paul Atreides (Leto's father) is able to win the war on Dune is because the Bene Gesserit started cynically using religious memes to infect populations with centuries before. When Paul arrives, the Fremen who live in the Dune desert were long ago implanted with a saviour religion that makes them see Paul as essentially the second coming. (I'm thinking Herbert may have been influenced by the story of how Cortez was perceived as a god by the Inca, though I don't know how true that story is.) Paul's problem is that the religious fervour that he rides to the emperorship is too strong, and will inevitably result in a massive orgy of violence. (I think Herbert uses the word jihad.)
In God Emperor, Leto recognises the same problem, and has deliberately cultivated an army of women, because he believes that their religious belief in him as a god will not lead to the same violent outcome.
I think Herbert wasn't very interested in the question of whether Leto is a god (he defines Leto very clearly in his own terms). But he is very interested in the power of religion as a social force.
They also did the next best thing to harvesting the spice from a safe distance without living in Sandworm Country. The Great House presence on Arrakis pre-Muad'dib was mostly limited to a settled region near the North Pole which had a somewhat less hostile climate than most of the rest of the planet and was protected from sandworms by a ring of elevated rocky terrain called the "shield wall". The spice-collection operations were based out of here, using giant cargo aircraft (carryalls) to deliver mobile spice-harvesting equipment and crews whenever a worthwhile deposit was found, then pick everything up and skedaddle when a sandworm inevitably turned up.
The people closest to living in sandworm country were the Fremen, who lived in scattered communities in the deep desert and had various cultural adaptation to both the ridiculously harsh climate and the proximity sandworms. Even the Fremen mostly lived and worked in underground communities dug into terrain that was too rocky for sandworms, although the Fremen did frequently venture out into the open desert for various reasons including spice collection for personal use and for sale to smugglers. If the origin of the Fremen is every explored in detail, I missed it, but as the series opens they seem to be of the opinion that the sandworms are easier to live with than the Harkonnens.
It's been a long time, but I think I remember that the Fremen were forced to move from one planet to another, several times, before ending up on Arrakis. So I suppose they fled into the desert to avoid whoever it was who kept doing this to them. I also remember them resenting being denied the Hajj, so I guess they were Muslim at some point.
They were described as "Zensunni", which might be one of the "Buddislamic variants" described in the appendices. There's apparently been a lot of religious mixing in the 20,000ish years between now and then. Among other things, while various Arabic words have been roughly preserved, the meaning has often changed, so "hajj" to the Fremen appears to mean something slightly different than it does to people of early-21st-century Earth. In context, it appears to be something like "the sacred right to travel wherever God commands you to travel", though that's just my interpretation.
Regarding 2, another factor is that the Spacing Guild has a trade monopoly on space travel. The Great Houses are restricted to surface-to-orbit ships, which dock with space-only Guild transports in order to travel to other star systems.
The Guild is referred to several times as a "parasite", and one of the things it does to ensure the survival of its host organism (galactic civilization) is to charge exorbitant prices for military transport. Thus, most (all?) warfare between Great Houses is classified as a "War of Assassins", which seems to include assassination, sabotage, duels, a formal definition of "traitor", and other stuff like that. Military action tends to be limited to small-scale raids by elite troops, because the Guild charges too much for anything bigger.
Also, the Guild uses spice for safe interstellar travel, and its use is addictive, so they are very much interested in being the one and only chokepoint that controls access to the spice.
Right. The Guild absolutely need spice, and conveniently they absolutely control access to Arrakis. They *also* need someone to do the dangerous, messy, industrial work of actually harvesting and refining spice, which isn't a good match for their normal skillset. But they don't want to be dependent on anyone else.
So they have three redundant pipelines of spice up from Arrakis. First, CHOAM and whichever Great House has the official contract to harvest spice. Second, the essentially mercenary spice smugglers that Gurney Halleck hooked up with for a while, and that everybody knows about but nobody ever seems to get around to completely suppressing. And third, the Fremen themselves, who pay a regular bribe in spice to the Guild in order to protect their privacy so nobody knows there are millions of them.
As Eric Rall notes, all of this harvesting is done by people who live in the rocky, marginally habitable, not-worm-infested parts of Arrakis and commute to the desert for work. If you were really fanatical about "Arrakis sucks, nobody should live there", I suppose you could have them live in orbital habitats and commute to the surface in shuttles. But space is an even harsher environment than Arrakis, and space shuttles are probably more expensive to operate than ornithopters, so that would be inefficient.
It would also be harder to do in a way that allows for a triple-redundant supply of spice to the Guild, without making it too obvious that the Guild is putting its thumb on the scales.
All these responses are much appreciated; I feel like this is giving me a really good sense of some of the texture of Herbert's worldbuilding. And everybody's been nice enough not to say "why don't you just read the damn book for yourself?"
But I also feel like now I have this higher-order question that I'm not sure even reading the books would answer. Why is Dune set in space? It seems like Herbert decided to give Dune an interstellar setting, then devised this elaborate set of stipulations so as to make anything space-related a null factor in the story.
Anything about space as a strategic environment, or the Roddenberrian sense of openness to uncharted, undiscovered worlds, is preempted by the device of the Spacing Guild. Then again, one planet is of such overriding importance that it's fine for pretty much all the action to take place there anyway. There are (the equivalent of) Bedouins, which I guess you can come up with a space-based explanation for, but definitely makes *more* sense you imagine humans expanding over that planet only, with non-state groups getting forced onto more and more marginal lands.
Also the Bedouins can, properly led, become a formidable military force, because the technologies we'd associate with the capacity for spaceflight have themselves been stipulated away in one way or another. No computers, no ICBMs, and for some complicated reason I've now forgotten everybody fights with swords. The political system seems essentially medieval; religion is, IIRC, a series of syncretic mashups of our familiar historical world religions.
So, if you're Herbert writing on a blank slate, you could just, like, not set the story in space. Or you could give it an interstellar setting, then build in all these epicycles so that everything playing out as if society were at the organizational and technological level of Eurasia circa 1100 makes internally consistent sense. And the way Herbert goes about doing that is inventive and often impressive in its own right.
The decision itself just feels undermotivated. Herbert doesn't seem to particularly like space. He goes out of his way to tamp down the impulse to find anything fun and cool about it. Uniquely among writers of his time, he imagined future spaceflight on ballistic principles not as an extension *beyond* the race to the Moon, but instead as the lame cuck surface-to-orbit stuff we actually got. He does have one alien species, but it seems like the sandworms play roughly the same structural role that dragons do in a lot of medieval-themed fantasy, and Game of Thrones didn't have to be set in space just to get one made-up species into it.
Overall, it just strikes me as odd.
They use knives because they have tech that stops guns. But why don't they use swords? And why don't they wear knife-proof armor in addition to their anti-gun "shields"?
They do use swords. Rapiers, if I remember correctly the Paul-and-Gurney scene from the first book. Also, poisoned blades are common, as well as weapons that fire slow-moving projectiles (also poisoned).
My explanation for their not using armor is that *any* armor slows you down and drains stamina like you wouldn't believe. That's been my experience from doing HEMA (medieval fencing) - fighting in armor sucks, even it's just padded cotton.
So my take is that Dune's "shields and cloth" approach is the maximum of protection with the minimum of encumbrance, a compromise arrived at after millennia of small-scale warfare.
I do wish Herbert would have just ignored lasers altogether, the whole laser-on-shield explosion thing does just about nothing narratively. Just let lasers go through shields like butter, but impractical as weapons (power, cooling, hard to manufacture etc).
For all of its drawbacks, armor was near-universal before guns made it useless. And the Dune setting should have high-tech materials that reduce the drawbacks. Gurney Halleck, etc., are knights whose foes do not use guns, so they should be wearing heavy armor in battle. And maybe some sort of armor every day given their culture's constant backstabbing and paranoia.
But they do wear armor every day - the shields belts are always on them, except maybe in bed. Anything material would just add too little protection to matter, while imposing a non-negligible cost.
Once again, I think you don't realize just how close to "perfect armor" those shields are. Super light, near-zero time to put it on/take it off, definitely stops *anything* moving fast leaving you guaranteed time to react, no repeat no weakpoints, full visibility (ever tried sparring with a fencing mask on?)
>The Dune setting should have high-tech materials
You mean except the energy shields? Anyway, feel free to write your own universe, or maybe some Dune fanfic, and be assured that I at least will definitely give it a read.
The shield-and-cloth thing bothered me as well, but your argument about encumbrance is an intriguing justification. I was about to counter it with the standard argument that the encumbrance of armor is exaggerated in popular imagination (*), but then I reread your comment more closely and it registered that you were speaking from personal HEMA experience and probably know quite a bit more about the matter than I do, the maximum of my fighting-in-armor experience is wearing a cheap aluminum chainmail hauberk while fighting in boffer LARPs.
(*) This is especially the case for full plate. One big source of misunderstanding about its encumbrance is confusion between jousting armor and combat armor, with the former being far heavier and more restrictive of mobility. Another is accounts of Henry VIII needing to be lifted onto his horse with winches and pulleys during the 1544 Siege of Boulogne, which sometimes gets exaggerated and overgeneralized to apply to all armored knights, while the actual problem was that this was late in King Henry's life when he had gotten extremely fat (to the point where a Spanish diplomat reported that three large men could fit in Henry's doublet) and had a chronic abscess on one of his legs from an old jousting injury.
It'd be an interesting intellectual exercise to come up with armor design that would supplement the protection of Dune's shields with a minimum of encumbrance, though. My first idea for low-hanging fruit would be a shirt similar in construction to modern cut-resistant gloves (i.e. knitted synthetic fiber with a high strength against cutting, such as kevlar, dyneema, or HPPE), which probably wouldn't provide meaningful protection against the kinds of full-force sword blows that historical battlefield armor protects against, but would provide at least partial protection against the precise and relatively-slow strikes that we see Paul being trained to deliver (and guard against) for the purposes of getting through shields. I've worked in level A5 (medium duty) cut-resistant kitchen gloves and didn't find them significantly encumbering.
Re: armor design--I do modern fencing (foil & saber) and I think you're on the right track there. Modern fencing gear is designed to be resistant to at least 800N (if not 1200N) of force and covers pretty much all the vital points. Making similarly-shaped garments out of a material with higher cut resistance should not substantially increase the weight and should retain a lot of mobility.
I don't know I also have done HEMA, and I would say exactly the reverse about armor. It is wildly less restricting and encumbering than you would think. Kind of hot, but other than that no big deal. But I am a hockey player, so maybe that is why, used to gear.
It definitely encumbers you *some*, but I would put it in the single digits percent, while increasing your survivability substantially.
That isn't even getting into the issue of how it tilts the offense/defense balance because even pretty minimal armor suddenly takes large areas of targets out of play for your enemy and reduces the need to parry everything.
Sure, the fitter the better. The point is that you're giving up valuable speed and stamina, for an advantage in protection that isn't that valuable, since the shield already protects you very effectively.
Herbert says the balance ended up at shields and underwear, and I don't think it's absurd.
I don't think there's anything that actually suggests they DON'T wear armour in context-appropriate situations - I don't believe the actual equipment of the soldiers is ever described in that much detail (and armored ones certainly exist), and there's no reason to think that a lot of the clothing they wear isn't armored to some extent. The weapons are just very good at cutting through it.
I think his Galactic Empire is a dystopia, and part of what the first book does is show how it operates and hint at how it got that way. The feudal social structure is explicitly described as "a place for every man, and every man in his place". And then the books gradually disrupt the dystopia, until the 5th book 5000 years later, when the old Galactic Empire is just a rump state of historical interest, and the vast majority of humanity is in the "Scattering", having sought out strange new worlds with new life forms, and having built many new civilizations (and thus having developed many interesting new dysfunctions of their own). (And then by the 6th book, the planet Dune has been nuked to a lifeless crisp.)
Also, my understanding is that the original book "Dune" started as ecological musings, spurred by some ecological work he was doing for the State of California. So to wildly speculate, it started with the idea of a planet that had been transformed into desert by the introduction of an alien form of life. Then add people who learned to survive, and extrapolate what they'd be like. And then those people were given a plan on how to transform their planet into a garden paradise, heightening an already-artificially-enhanced religious fervor. And then a Messiah got dropped onto them. Overall, I think "Dune" is more of an anthropological study than pretty much any sci-fi I've read, outside of Le Guin. Less action, more appendices. ;-)
Also worth noting is that the Great Houses do all have nuclear weapons, referred to as their "family atomics". They tend to be hidden, and some are smuggled onto other worlds, and there's a delicate balance of power among the Great Houses, and between them collectively and the Emperor (who has more and better ground troops). The "Great Convention", their Geneva Protocol equivalent, reads in part, "Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration."
I'd like to take issue with the following point: "Therein lies the secondary risk of AI; by creating an AI that coddles us, we run the risk of never advancing as a race again. As Dune points out, soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce."
This premise is often trotted out, and I don't think it's properly examined.
A) It's very hard to hold something as fluid as a race of intelligent people in stasis. I ask for proof that the human ambition for exploration, discovery and pushing boundaries can be quashed by being coddled. It seems more likely that coddling includes facilitating self-discovery and improvement than the alternative.
B) What's the inherent good in advancing? If you're imposing a harsh environment, you're hurting people. Why? If it is to enable a better future where people suffer less, then when you eventually reach that future you can go soft, right?
Finally, creating an AI that strives to "[identify] what it is that makes humans human and [amplify] those traits in a positive direction" seems like it's more likely to 'lock in' current conceptions of humanity and goodness than anything else. What ultimately needs to advance is not just humanity, but the conception of what humanity is. If anything, an AI that facilitates people in preference-driven self-modification seems better.
I guess that is (for a big part) the question the DUNE-series is exploring (Harald Martenstein: I write a novel when the ideas become too big to explore in a column or short-story"). As a 17-year-old reader I felt more and more bored with Dune as the understanding grew: There is no final aim/meaning and there can not be. - As Steven Pinker put it: You can always ask "Why?"/"And what's the meaning of that?!" after each "ultimate aim"/"final meaning". - Thus as there can not be "a biggest number", there can not be a "final meaning". (Did he got that from his wife?) -
First book is a great paperback-novel, "full of sound and fury". The last two books - after GEoD - I could not even finish half-way ("a tale told by an idiot?"), though I was enjoying the encyclopedia.
OTOH: Herbert clearly disdains the "museum-fremen" - and he made the reader admire the "harsh" fremen of the desert in book 1. But, as you said, the results of their "victory", kinda devalue their struggle, "signifying nothing". Or do they? - Btw: Rambo III got kinda meaningful with decades passing by.
> *If you're imposing a harsh environment, you're hurting people. Why? If it is to enable a better future where people suffer less, then when you eventually reach that future you can go soft, right?*
No. Within the context of the novel, Leto's goal isn't to *enable* a future where "people suffer less", but to *prevent* a future where the entirety of humanity gets wiped out and goes extinct.
I'm not arguing with the AI risk element in the context of the novel. I'm arguing with the secondary goal of the AI as laid out by the reviewer. He seems to be arguing that any benevolent AI we make should impose a harsh environment to foster humanity in a Leto-esque fashion, and it's that second part I disagree with.
Humans have pets which are coddled. These pets don't do much advancing. And if humanity goes extinct, these pets are more likely to do so as well than animals which remained wild. You could argue that humans themselves were domesticated, but recall Scott's review from years ago of Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success"*. There was constant competition between groups leading to cultural selection.
*I have my own review linking to Scott's five related posts here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/the-secret-of-our-success/
Humans have some significant innate differences from animals that make the analogy between them fairly useless, so far as this argument goes. It seems you're defining 'advancement' as 'maintaining a competitive advantage'. I think we, with our globalized society, can come up with a better definition centered around human flourishing, which doesn't require constant evolutionary pressure to achieve. Especially if we're giving that definition to a benevolent AI.
Humans are a species of animal.
I used the term "advancing" because you did above, I did not "define" it. But I was implicitly relying on the idea that humans have themselves "advanced" over time from our shared ancestors with other species.
"Flourishing" sounds vague and not very well defined. I suppose the simplest definition would be in terms of having a large/expanding population, in which case the animals domesticated by humans have generally flourished (horses took a big hit after being displaced by machines, but still aren't at risk of extinctions), while numerous other species have not. But if humans go extinct, and then our domesticated animals do as well (I think pigs might still have good odds, they go feral easily), that would clearly not be "flourishing".
Advancing toward what?
Like I said, I used that word because the person I was responding to did. In an abstract sense we could describe all species as "advancing" over time in an evolutionary state space of many dimensions.
We don’t know. But if we stop, we certainly won’t get there.
I also object to the excerpt you quoted. First, one should distinguish cultural, technological and genetic 'advancement', which take place on very different time scales and are subject to different forces.
The part of coddling sounds to me like meme "bad times create hard men", which celebrates harsh living conditions as a prerequisite to prosperity. I would argue that mostly, the opposite is true. People with little slack [0] seldom accomplish much beyond survival, while some people with enough slack accomplish much. I think that it would be fair to describe Shakespeare as being "cuddled" by the English nobility. About almost all of our advantages in science and technology are made by people who do not have to worry where their next meal comes from. Even for military matters, the idea of harsh living conditions producing the best fighters has be thoroughly been debunked. [1]
Genetically speaking, too much slack might indeed lead to a higher prevalence of genetic illnesses, I expect that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle selects against bad eyesight in a way that our lifestyle does not. The compassionate answer to that dilemma is not to kill people or have them fend for their survival, but to use CRISPR to fix the next generation.
Of course, the spectrum between a cruel jailer AI and a benevolent overlord AI is continuous: every such system would have to constrain competing AIs at the very least to be stable. Providing any humans with anything they request (like plutonium or fentanyl ) is also not likely to optimize human flourishing. Putting humans into happy VR sims is debatable. Any sufficiently advanced nanny-state is indistinguishable from totalitarism.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
I share your skepticism about "bad times create hard men", but it's a major theme of the Dune series. The Emperor in the first novel recruits his best troops from a horrible prison planet. The Fremen turn out to be even better fighters, even though they're not even full-time soldiers, because their planet is even worse.
The theme also appears in The Dosadi Experiment by the same author.
On the relevance of "slack" vs competition, I'd recommend another post from ACOUP:
https://acoup.blog/2021/05/28/collections-teaching-paradox-europa-universalis-iv-part-iv-why-europe/
Although I think I'd disagree with him on the development paths of the Spanish/Portugese empires vs the more fragmented German states (yes, both rank above Germany in his linked graph on urbanization, but so does similarly fragmented Italy).
Yes, I thought of that as well when I browsed through the SSC post I linked. In reality, military technology is not developed at leisure by a society with no external threats and lot's of slack, like Scott's Civilization Aztec. The fixed tech tree of Civ, where the discovery of tech is totally divorced from using related tech, so that a land-locked nation could discover ships of the line or an insular nation could develop musketeers without ever being in a conflict is clearly not realistic. EU does try to be more reasonable there (IIRC, you get military points/naval points from fighting battles).
In reality, one probably needs the right mixture of certain types of slack plus other resources.
I haven't played Civilization, but the real life Aztec warred a lot. They didn't do much sailing, although they were certainly not landlocked.
The acoup series is excellent, but proves a slightly different point than "harsh living conditions don't produce the best fighters". Instead Bret Devereaux shows that societies with harsh living conditions usually lose wars against societies with soft living conditions, principally because the society with soft living conditions has an enormous economic advantage (that's how they got to have a soft living) and being able to heavily equip, train full time, and supply an army is a massive advantage. He also shows that countries that espouse badassery (e.g. the Spartans, Nazi Germany - an example that did have a capable economy) are terrible at diplomacy, to the extent that what starts as a winnable war splurges into a contest against 3/4rds of the world.
This doesn't directly challenge the approach of e.g. the British Empire recruiting many of its best regiments from the poorer Scottish, Irish or Gurkha backgrounds. Bret Devereaux is more interested in achieving strategic objectives than he is in raising super soldiers (though at minimum we can say that the soft society bloke in heavy armour, with years of focused training, can usually beat quite a few fierce hunters with sharpened toothpicks).
> This doesn't directly challenge the approach of e.g. the British Empire recruiting many of its best regiments from the poorer Scottish, Irish or Gurkha backgrounds.
You need to pay your soldiers enough that they want to be soldiers instead of whatever else they might be doing. This is easier if you're recruiting the poor.
The Spartans did manage to beat the Athenians in the ancient Greek version of a war that kept absorbing more belligerents. So the terrible Athenian decision to invade Sicily/Syracuse is now the blunder remembered.
>the soft society bloke in heavy armour, with years of focused training, can usually beat quite a few fierce hunters with sharpened toothpicks
Sure, but only because the "softie" was hardened (and taught discipline and cohesion) by years of harsh training, essentially imitating the "barbarians'" life. That's the best argument in favor of the "hard times" meme - to make strong men, create a harsh microcosm, no other way will do.
Bret Devereaux hates the idea, though. So there's that.
Then why aren't we all speaking Mongol (and calling the Mongols barbarians is somewhat debatable in any case)? Why is North America a going concern of majority-English-speakers? It's not just numbers.
Devereaux also rather thoroughly takes apart the idea that the Spartans were particularly better at fighting than other Ancient Greeks.
There's also the bit where the Ancient Romans cheerfully curb-stomped plenty of opponents using militia armies. Ditto the Ancient Greeks, for that matter.
> why aren't we all speaking Mongol
Same reason we're not all speaking Latin. It's *complicated* and definitely not determined by who had the best fighters 1v1.
> Devereaux also rather thoroughly takes apart the idea that the Spartans were particularly better at fighting than other Ancient Greeks
Rather at diplomacy and strategy. See previous sentence.
>the Ancient Romans cheerfully curb-stomped plenty of opponents using militia armies
You mean like when the Gauls sacked Rome? The Romans' armies became more effective as they became more professional, precisely in order to defeat "the barbarians". The guys who pacified the West, having defeated Carthage and Seleucia, they were pros, not seasonal militia.
And the way they turned citizens into effective soldiers, was by harsh training. qed
...Virtually nothing is ever determined by who has the best fighters 1v1.
The Spartans also were godawful at diplomacy and pretty mediocre at strategy too, which he also deals with.
The guys who defeated Carthage, however, were NOT professionals. They were levied from the propertied citizen body.
And if harsh training suffices to fix the inadequacies of civilized life when facing barbarians, it'd seem to make more sense to be soft while we can, being harsh only when we need to be.
There's more than one way to build cohesion. If I were looking to hire an artillerist, I'd strongly prefer a knack for trigonometry over, say, the ability to slay a wild boar barehanded. Savage glory isn't where you find the best factory workers and maintenance technicians, and when you've got those, one "I dunno, I just work here" chump sitting in a well-supplied machine gun nest can almost casually wipe out several hundred brave, hardened heroes who forgot to bring armor support.
> There's more than one way to build cohesion. If I were looking to hire an artillerist, I'd strongly prefer a knack for trigonometry over, say, the ability to slay a wild boar barehanded
Neither of those is what "cohesion" means. Devereux does a good job explaining the concept, briefly it's about soldiers' willingness to stand together and fight instead of going every man for himself.
> one "I dunno, I just work here" chump sitting in a well-supplied machine gun nest can almost casually wipe out several hundred
I really don't think you're right here. Read up some WW1 history, it's way, way more complicated than that. Peace!
Yes, I've read it, and I apologize for oversimplifying and explaining poorly. Perhaps you should re-read that series on the battle of Helm's Deep, where he discusses how the uruk-hai have 'barbarically harsh' training and crap cohesion, while the bulk of Rohan's force is civilians with barely any training and yet excellent cohesion.
I love that people did fiction!
Decent review, and yes, God Emperor is definitely worth reading. It's gotta be the second best in the series.
But I want to strongly disagree with something that seems to be assumed in passing in both this review and the Dune books:
"success can make you soft," "soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce"
This is a classic tough guy trope. It sounds like wisdom. But I'm pretty sure it's complete nonsense. If the research shows us anything, it's that winners tend to win more. And common sense should tell us that we live in a much softer environment than any of our historical and prehistorical forebears, and yet we do much tougher things than they ever did (like live to 90, for example).
In fact, this kind of claim is often used to conflate at least three different things, and each one would need to be separately teased out and researched.
(1) Do individual people tend to become weaker given success/a soft environment? This is a question about human psychology. My feeling is that the answer is unambiguously no, but there's always room for argument.
(2) Do human cultures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? This is a question about cultural evolution, which is highly underspecified. I'm not sure I even know what a weak or strong culture is, so this question remains entirely open.
(3) Do evolving creatures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? I suspect this question is in fact much more context-dependent than it looks. We can fairly straightforwardly understand strength in this question to mean something like 'population resilience in the face of external environment shock,' but I suspect you'd just find a bunch of contradictory answers. An organism that's had it easy might have a high population, and they're harder to wipe out; an organism that's had it easy might have a narrow ecological niche (e.g. diet), so a highly specific environment shock might have a more devastating effect. I dunno if these factors make it a wash, but they're at least complex enough that I would reject any blanket statement like "success makes softness."
I'd recommend ACOUP's series on this sad trope. Let's say it's not just "not right", it's completely wrong.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
That's an amazing blog, thanks for the link!
Yes indeed - I loved the Dune books and read GEoD pretty much when it was published (I was 14 in 1981). A wonderful fantasy with lots of highly questionable political and evolutionary ideas. Good to see the reviewer making the connection with AGI...
Zvi has this fantastic blog on his substack-blogroll as the only entry under "History". But I had not yet got to the fremen series, and it may be the best - so: big thanks for the link!
ACOUP is not exactly a neutral source of dispassionate analysis. IIRC he's even open on the blog itself about effectively rewriting history to be more leftist.
That must be the first historian ever not being "exactly a neutral source of dispassionate analysis". rofl (History was my minor, but I assume even tenured professors in gender-studies are not all "exactly a neutral source of dispassionate analysis". ) - He is open about it? Even that is not a first, but highly recommendable! - Seriously: This guy knows his field - military history - rather well + can explain it way better than most. And gives his main sources from primary sources plus relevant literature. The fun parts are comparing movies and games with historic reality. - When I studied in the nineties, there actually were some "rightist" history profs left - mostly on the, well, fringes of academia -but Dr. Bret C. Devereaux would not haven stricken anyone as "more-lefty-than-the-mainstream" even then. "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" may not be that pedantic, but it is very good, entertaining and sound historical writing.
>I assume even tenured professors in gender-studies are not all "exactly a neutral source of dispassionate analysis".<
Is that a joke? I can't tell.
Regardless, "everyone's doing it" doesn't mean anything about the accuracy of one particular historian in question.
History is never just "saying what was" - whatever Leopold von Ranke meant by that. One has a perspective; one has to omit information, as there is usu. too much of them; one has to choose how much weight to put on X and on Z (esp. when there is too little information). One has to define beginnings and ends that elude definition. It is not math, neither are gender studies. It is laughable to suggest otherwise. (So, yeah, it was a joke). The particular historian in question is a fine example of competence, clarity and neutrality - even though this terms are relative not absolute, when it comes to historians and other social sciences. Let us stop wasting time in the comments and start reading his blog: https://acoup.blog/2020/02/21/collections-the-fremen-mirage-interlude-ways-of-the-fremen/
Sure, all true, but... that still doesn't tell us whether this particular example is better or worse than others. I can tell you "all food has some bacteria upon it", but that doesn't mean you should choose to chow down on a rotting fowl (heh, heh) carcass.
Personally, I wasn't impressed with the single article (the first one in the collection linked above, I believe) I read from this fellow; it seemed to me that a) he missed the point entirely: the "Fremen trope" isn't at all contradicted by his examples of nomads being defeated *by organization* — the idea is often more about individual mettle, and as he himself points out, the "tougher" society often lost *due to being outnumbered*... which is not at all a problem for the idea behind the trope; a II.), he misses the point again when suggesting that "people had rich land because they won" is a contradiction of the trope: that's exactly what you'd expect were it true (win the good land --> grow weak --> lose the good land); b), he ignores relevant distinctions to adhere to the specific format of the trope he's selected (e.g., he often cites victories from agrarian societies without comparing further facets: the Assyrians lived tougher lives than the Babylonians and had more military success, but he ignores this comparison because neither is a "barbarian" society); and c), I could build an equally strong case merely from emphasizing different sources — say, Doric invasions, Greeks-as-barbarians vs settled Persians set against Persians-as-barbarians vs settled Assyrians set against Arabs-as-barbarians vs settled Persians, etc etc.
I haven't read enough of his stuff to have a strong opinion, though, and I believe you when you say he's not as bad as most.
>When I studied in the nineties, there actually were some "rightist" history profs left - mostly on the, well, fringes of academia but Dr. Bret C. Devereaux would not haven stricken anyone as "more-lefty-than-the-mainstream" even then.
Yeah but that is a pretty big problem in academia generally and history in particular. When the median historian is a borderline Marxist, you tend to get some pretty strange consensus on certain things.
True. For seemingly a lot of what is going on in parts of academia now - and what had been going in (maybe smaller, maybe larger) parts of academia before 1968 (Adorno, anyone?) . Still, it does not apply to the historian in question. So as I concluded in another thread: time to stop here and go to that outstanding blog ;) https://acoup.blog/2021/08/13/collections-teaching-paradox-victoria-ii-part-i-mechanics-and-gears/ or any other
ACOUP is at least written by someone who earns a living researching history:
https://history.unc.edu/adjunct/bret-devereaux/
He certainly has a political angle on things. I'd still trust him over a rando rightwing blogger who "read the classics" and likes gifs with Roman sculptures - despite leaning more right than left, myself.
You're also free to refer to the original sources that he tends to abundantly cite.
But you're not trusting him over a "rando rightwing blogger". You're trusting him over Frank Herbert, a war veteran turned journalist turned author, who is in this work among others taking the position that comfort breeds weakness and adversity breeds strength. And discussing it in some detail. He may be wrong, but he's not *obviously* wrong. And he may not specifically have a Ph.D. in History, but the sort of narrow credentialism that thinks that ends the argument *is* obviously wrong.
Not gonna lie, I'd watch a debate between Devereaux and Herbert.
Herbert was a good writer with great ideas, but that doesn't make him an expert in history and social psychology as examined in real life societies. The question of whether difficult conditions make a society stronger is to be decided by evidence, not twitter hot takes wrapped into flashy worldbuilding.
>that doesn't make him an expert in history and social psychology
Unfortunately, looking at present human society, there aren't *any* experts in those fields. That is, as long as you call an expert someone who can *get stuff done effectively and reliably*.
Our so-called experts are about as useful social scientists as alchemists were useful chemists. It's probably a required stage of development, but expertise it ain't.
>Herbert was a good writer with great ideas, but that doesn't make him an expert in history and social psychology as examined in real life societies
Correct, but only because you've got causality reversed. Being an expert in history and social psychology, is what made Herbert a good writer and gave him his great ideas. Or if not an expert, at least a well-read amateur. And again, "he doesn't have a Ph.D. so he knows less than the guy who has the Ph.D.", doesn't work here.
Herbert's military experience consisted of six months as a photographer.
L Ron Hubbard, OTOH, commanded two ships. And Scientology remains a successful going concern well after his death. Sounds like a man with a keen understanding of people. Perhaps we should follow his wisdom.
Or perhaps we should not rely merely on their backgrounds for judging their arguments.
Personally, I think Herbert's view falls apart pretty hard the second you get into the bit where the way to breed a humanity that cannot be governed is to...govern it harder. That's not how natural selection works.
Adversity certainly breeds strength to a point. But so does comfort, for that matter. All this bullshit about hard times making hard men smacks of Internet tough-guy-ism, and notably comes from people in what they would characterize as soft times.
>Personally, I think Herbert's view falls apart pretty hard the second you get into the bit where the way to breed a humanity that cannot be governed is to...govern it harder. That's not how natural selection works.<
That has nothing to do with the "hard times, hard men" concept, though. That's a plot device from his book, not the basis of the concept, and entirely unnecessary in making a case for it.
While reading ACOUP with an awareness of Bret Devereaux's biases is certainly wise, I can't think of an occaison when he advocates misrepresenting history to be more leftist. He talks about the problems of our sources, written overwhelmingly by male elites, obscuring or minimising the role of the poor and women, and how we might unearth a more complete view. Certainly an approach with dangers, but by no means a 1984 Ministry of Truth approach to history!
(different anon here)
Yes, when he's describing how things were (as in his current logistics series), he appears to be trying to present history neutrally, and his left-wing-ness usually shows up when highlighting parts of history that have traditionally been relatively ignored. Which is great.
But when he's arguing for more general theses, like the "Fremen Mirage" or the series on the Dothraki, he goes into them with an axe to grind, and ignores or overlooks contrary evidence, while still reporting supporting evidence like a good historian. Instead of asking questions like a historian, he presents tacit assumptions. This has happened enough that I'm sadly inclined to be generally skeptical even when he's not doing that. (This is probably good training for a historian, though.)
tongue in cheek: Also I have major disagreements with his presentation of Marius and Sulla when he was discussing the Roman Republic a few months ago. But since he barely spent a paragraph on them, I kept my peace.
His Twitter presence seems to be building moderate-left social credit which he then spends on correcting far-left misconceptions, which is probably the most effective way to do that.
>Also I have major disagreements with his presentation of Marius and Sulla when he was discussing the Roman Republic a few months ago. But since he barely spent a paragraph on them, I kept my peace.
Very curious, what were your thoughts?
I think you are underestimating how cautious a non-tenured professor should be in regard to his public pronouncements about things. His level of caution is, IMO, likely just prudent. People get ANGRY when you point out things from history they don't like or expect.
I'm not a professional historian, but am well-read enough and naturally critical enough I found little or nothing to disagree with with the two you mention. What contrary evidence do you refer to?
To me, that sounds just as bad as a Ministry of Truth approach to history: if you really, *really* want male elites to have done less and poor women to have done more, and you keep running into the fact that evidence seems to indicate they really didn't do much more than the naive assumption might credit them with... well, what are you gonna do, *let the evil oppressors win?!*
There is a large distinction between desperately trying to turn people not doing things into having done things, and just trying to find out what they WERE doing at the time.
It is the distinction between saying a woman wrote Shakespeare (or trying to "but women were doing X THAT WAS IMPORTANT AND A BIG DEAL TOO" and trying to find out what women like Shakespeare's wife were doing at the time.
Certainly true; well-stated.
I just seem to keep running into the "ALSO WOMEN WERE MAKING VERY IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS THAT TOTALLY MATTER PROBABLY MORE THAN ANYTHING ACTUALLY" sort of approach *every single goddamn time* someone starts virtuously saying things about overwhelmingly† male this, elite powerful biased that, minimizing‡ amazing downtrodden women the other...
It's quite soured me on the whole idea.
-------------
(†some might say "disgustingly", even; not me of course but *some* brave goodhearted souls might, though I am neutral on this groundbreaking and righteous approach of course)
(‡ undoubtedly maliciously, those bastards. I hope someone takes 'em down a peg. Not that this will influence my findings! I am indifferent between being a heroic warrior of justice and reinforcing the system of minimization and oppression that I'm specifically looking to counteract...)
The article is wonderful, thank you for the link!
It's worth being precise about what ACOUP's excellent series shows. It argues (successfully) that 'hard' typically nomadic societies, with only a couple of exceptions, lose wars against 'soft' agrarian societies. Mainly because their economies suck (the superior economy of the agrarian society is what let them be soft in the first place), and a strong economy to equip, train and supply your army is quite handy in war.
They also tend to suck at diplomacy so that winnable wars spin into 'whoops, it's now most of the known world vs. us'.
That's certainly a relavent insight to Herbert's "and now the Freemen will conquer the universe" (though notice the Freemen start with control over the most valuable thing in the universe, which is a bit of an economic edge, and that badass nomads conquer everything isn't completely without precedent <cough> Mongols</cough>), but it's not quite the same as 'success can't make you soft'.
>the Freemen start with control over the most valuable thing in the universe
Exactly. Also, the Spacing Guild is in Paul's pocket, so their enemies have zero strategic mobility while theirs is assured. Also, their leader is the literal Messiah, and also a human supercomputer who can see the future.
Herbert really went ouf of his way to explain why the Fremen conquer the Imperium.
I don't doubt his history, but his understanding of Dune and the Fremen is incredibly wrong.
> They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).
Not really? Liet-Kynes, the leader of the Fremen before Paul, was an ecologist, not a warrior. The Fremen warrior culture wasn't just men, women and children force Sardaukar into retreat, and Paul's concubine Chani kills seasoned warriors in single combat. We don't see much strong evidence in the books that all Fremen men are warriors, just that all Fremen are better warriors than pretty much anyone else in the galaxy.
> Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes.
Oh god no. Paul and Jessica are both impressed by the level of sophistication and education of the Fremen, and they're two of the most sophisticated and educated people alive at the time. They teach their children advanced ecology, they have specialized industries that create stillsuits, water harvesters, and products made from spice.
> Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents.
Again, no. The Fremen have control of the most important resource in the universe, and are technologically sophisticated. They have advanced technology that no one else in the galaxy can replicate, it's just specialized for their environment. They are doing a terraforming project on their planet that no one else in the galaxy could possibly attempt, and in fact, they all think it's impossible. The Emperor sneers at the idea.
All these things are assumptions that the greater universe has about the Fremen, but the greater universe also thinks there are tens of thousands of Fremen, when in reality there are tens of millions. The Fremen intentionally keep their true nature and abilities secret, and they are successful in doing so because they aren't primitive, unadvanced, unspecialized, or uneducated, they are successful precisely because they are specialized to their environment.
Well spoken, still: in "the encyclopedia of DUNE" - I cite from memory - the victory of the Fremen against the empire (that would not consider 10.000.000 an impressive planetary population) is explained (at least to a big part) by: While the empire had 10 (or was it 20) supporting soldiers for one fighting soldier the Fremen soldiers were 90% fighting soldiers. (I remember asking British soldiers about those numbers and they said, "yep, we are 8 to 1, the Americans are 11 to 1 - cuz they have all those cola-truck-drivers." ). - The Comanche were very specialized to their environment. But the whole bunch of them - living as pastoral nomads in the prairie, a garden Eden by the standards of Arrakis - was just 20 to 30k ("Empire of the morning sun"). Overtaking the US a pipe-dream.- ACOUP best part of the "fremen-mirage" series imho is to show where that fantasy is coming from (not Herbert, but Herodot; and running amok in the 19th century. https://acoup.blog/2020/02/14/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-iiib-myths-of-the-atreides/
I know this is rather belated, but first of all, he's arguing against a Mirage. The actual Fremen are not particularly relevant to the argument, mostly because they're fictional, and thus a useful stand-in for the general concept.
Second, your "they're not warriors, it's just that every single one of them is more lethal than civilized society's trained killers" is...not a counter-argument.
Third, Paul and Jessica are impressed because they expect primitive barbarians. They also still are able to take advantage of Missionaria Protectiva manipulation of the culture. So the culture's entire spiritual belief structure is an imposed manipulation from outside. That's...not exactly an argument for sophistication.
Fourth, the Fremen are a bunch of people on one planet, in a desert. The larger society is an interstellar empire. They are 100% poor and lacking resources compared to their opponents. They have some advantages, and some abilities.
Fifth, you are overlooking the comments of Duke Leto about how the Fremen could be a resource like the Sardaukar, specifically because of how tough and dangerous the environment is. And then how the Fremen will roll over the empire. And then how Leto's Fremen bodyguards will be ultimately disbanded because they've gone soft because things aren't tough enough any more. That's the thing Devereux is arguing against, and the Fremen ARE a rather prominent example of it.
Likewise, the fact that the genetic-memory nonsense is not actually true in the real actual world strongly undermines the applicability of anything like the long-term spring-winding that Leto employs to try to make humanity ungovernable. Since real actual genetics is much more Markovian than presented here -- "pressure" does not accumulate over generations -- Leto's millennia of perfect tyranny would tend to straightforwardly strip out the ungovernable tendencies he's ostensibly trying to promote. It only makes sense in the context of this fictional framing of genetics that bears no resemblance to reality.
>And common sense should tell us that we live in a much softer environment than any of our historical and prehistorical forebears, and yet we do much tougher things than they ever did (like live to 90, for example).
What? There's nothing tough about this. We are not living into our 90s because we're tougher - its because out environment is "softer". Life was shorter in the past precisely because things were tougher. And I imagine that people who lived through genuine hardship (which was a MUCH more common experience in western countries in the past than today) would handle the problems associated with old age better than people do today and will do in the future (controlling for life being easier in the future).
>(1) Do individual people tend to become weaker given success/a soft environment? This is a question about human psychology. My feeling is that the answer is unambiguously no, but there's always room for argument.
Do you imagine we're as tough as Americans 100 years ago? Do you think people today would handle the idea of having to live through something comparable to the great depression or fight in something like WW2 half as well as the Americans who actually lived through these things did? For WW2, this seems so obviously not the case that it's almost comical to even ask. As for the depression, the vastly more mild experience of covid-19 and how poorly many people took it suggests the answer is also a resounding no. What have younger Americans ever done that compares to stuff like this?
At the very least, it's an open question as to how they would handle genuine hardship and certainly not unambiguously a "no" towards people becoming weaker.
>(3) Do evolving creatures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? I suspect this question is in fact much more context-dependent than it looks.
Well, once you had to be tough to live long enough to reproduce and be able to provide for your. Today in western countries, virtually everyone survives long enough to reporduce and can provide for children enough for them to grow up and reproduce. This means that in theory, reproduction no longer meaningfully selects for toughness (of any kind), meaning more non-tough people are passing on their genes than earlier times in history.
You just seem to be saying the tough guy theory to me. And some of your "facts" don't seem to match up to the reality of these events.
For example: "the vastly more mild experience of covid-19"
There's been 1 million US covid deaths; WW2 caused a little under 500,000 US casualties. Those two numbers aren't necessarily comparable, of course. But when one thing kills twice as many as another, calling it "vastly more mild" without any argument seems premature.
And "something like WW2 half as well as the Americans who actually lived through these things;" "covid-19 and how poorly many people took it"
Do you know how people "took" WW2? I know it's mythologised in the history books (so much more in my native Britain - all that blitz spirit, what ho!), but in reality was there mental illness? depression? social upheaval? political backlash? If you know the answers to these questions, I'd be interested to hear. But the surface level 'they were tough back in the old days' doesn't seem to me to be well supported. It's just the four Yorkshiremen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k
COVID mostly killed old people. If we had done nothing at all about it, more people would have died, but they'd still mostly be old people and eventually everyone would have some immunity due to prior infection. Contrast with what happens absent fighting back in WW2: the enemy wins.
Folk beliefs about mental illness appear to be wrong. Suicide rates went down under COVID-19 because shared societal hardship is actually bearable. There's also a "rally round the flag effect" where people support their government more when it's fighting a war, although this does diminish over time (and took longer during WW2 because it was a big war and the Allies were more successful than, for example, Italy).
Thanks. I'm not sure if this is in agreement or disagreement with me, or just some relevant comments. I basically agree with what you wrote (to the extent that I understand anything).
He's saying you're probably wrong about WWII and that COVID isn't comparable regardless of death count, in my reading.
Oops, I'd misunderstood what this was referring to, hence the deleted post. Yeah, maybe... if TGGP wants to weigh back in, he's welcome to.
>(3) Do evolving creatures tend to develop into weaker forms given success/a soft environment? I suspect this question is in fact much more context-dependent than it looks.
Totally agree, I think that it really depends, especially on the cause of mortality. In cases where mortality is unpredictable, harsh environment with high mortality select for short lifes and early reproduction. In our species, it is for example thought that the different, and usually genetically unrelated, populations of very short people have evolved their reduced height because they lived in environment with high mortality that favored very early reproduction, which was associated with being very short.
Another example, polynesians have historically been subjected to a high risk of starvation, especially during the episodes of colonization, which led to a greater tendency towards storage of calories.
Both examples are quite clearly adaptations produced by living in harsh enviroments, but I would not call them "increased thougness".
Anyone who thinks that the current generation isn't tough enough to handle adversity has never tried playing Dark Souls.
> If the research shows us anything, it's that winners tend to win more.
In addition to Jason Maguires excellent rebuttal of your point, let me give a counter-example on a societal level: The Roman Republic, and the early Roman Empire, was exceptionally successful over a long period. This success, together with the lack of existential external threats, invited corruption and infighting, which weakened their society and ultimately led to their downfall.
This doesn't make any sense at all. I'm no historian, so this is just Wiki history, but check this out: "In 376, unmanageable numbers of Goths and other non-Roman people, fleeing from the Huns, entered the Empire...In 476, the Germanic barbarian king Odoacer deposed the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in Italy"
That is, it took the Roman Empire a full century to fall. In that time how many other states rose and fell? How many other countries did those Goths wipe out? You've made what I call "half an argument": you've identified that one bad thing happened (the Roman Empire fell), and then jumped to the conclusion: so it must have been weak. What you've failed to do is compare it to a control group. The question should be: was the Roman Empire weaker than other states/empires? And the answer to that seems to be no. It was a tough nut, so tough it stood for a century even after being fatally undermined. And then it persisted for another five centuries in a different center. That sound like winning to me. History certainly doesn't seem to show that after experiencing a period of success, the Roman Empire was weaker than the average empire.
That's an assertion that the Romans themselves made, but it doesn't bear up too much examination. It was the Roman way to look at their ancestors as stronger and better than the current crop of corrupt fools, and they'd been profession doom upon Rome long before Julius Caesar showed up. It is just as valid to look at the the Roman Empire staying roughly as strong as they ever were and their opponents growing to match them, as it is to say the Roman Empire declined to the point where they were overrun by enemies they could handily beat before. Indeed, there is more to suggest the former than the later with increasing sophistication of Germanic tribes visible in the archaeological record.
If the Romans were brought down by the Persians, you might have a point. But the Germans did not grow in sophistication until they reached the Romans, rather the Romans regressed to the point that they could be defeated and then civilization detectably declined. We can tell from pollen that forests grew over what was once agricultural land, traces of pollution went down as metalworking declined. Of course it was something like a decade ago* that I was reading books about the Roman collapse and only more recently** that I've been reading allegorical scifi takes on it of the sort Herbert was responding to.
* https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-collapse-of-complex-societies/ https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/empires-and-barbarians/
** https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/05/21/foundation/
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/ argues that it was not so much barbarian hordes overrunning Rome as political infighting within the Roman elite leading to the fall.
The Roman were already corrupt and infighting 150 years bc, and yet the Republic/empire kept growing for 3 good centuries afterward.
"success can make you soft," "soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce" This seems to have been an important idea for Herbert, as it is central to the Dune and Dosadi cycles, and he mentionsit again and again within the novels.
Like you, I have always found it very unconvincing. It seems obvious to me that people who have the misfortune to live in very bad circumstances do not become super strong. My impression was that FH had in mind some kind of natural selection process, but it does not make sense in the context that he described.
For all three of those, consider the difference between eustress and distress and the process of hormesis.
On a social/species scale you can also cull the less adapted, which certainly is _a_ strategy, the question is how many useful traits you're losing in the process and how steep the terrain around the local minimum becomes.
Relevant Scottpost:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
Doesn't this depend on how we define tough?
I think that a less personality-related example would be just the physical changes that happen in a tougher environment. If you repeatedly use your hands for a mildly damaging activity (playing the guitar for example), you will build calluses and then your hands will stop being hurt. If I were to start playing guitar with my soft fingers, it would not go as well as it would for a guitar player, or probably also for a physical laborer.
Some things, like muscle mass, would probably vary. We are much larger than people historically were (in the US at least), and so we probably could be stronger. But at the same time over one third of the US is obese, so we aren't taking advantage of our opportunities to become healthier than our ancestors. Overall, for most physical activities, I would bet on a medieval peasant over a modern American.
Maybe just to make sure I'm making a point here, I think that generally I would say something more like "going through a situation prepares you to go through more like it." I don't think a medieval peasant could function in modern society, and I don't think that a modern person could function as a medieval peasant
"guitar...calluses...soft..." I see the point of this example, but there is an obvious counter: If I had a weak back (true story!), and then repeatedly strained it by lifting heavy things at odd angles, am I going to get (a) stronger or (b) weaker? I think your example of learning a skill in such a way as to strengthen yourself physically is actually a very very very narrow part of the whole spectrum of things that people do. The reason you think of it is that while 99% of the things you can do with a guitar just hurt you, generations of teachers have successfully distilled the best way to learn and develop those calluses in a way that merely strengthens you. This is highly sophisticated cultural knowledge. If you attempted to learn, I dunno, Mongolian throat singing, without a professional teacher, there is a fair possibility that you could damage your throat/vocal chords.
"for most physical activities, I would bet on a medieval peasant over a modern American"
I think I'd take that bet. I see what you're imagining: a sturdy farmer vs. an obese computer jockey. But if the test is to be fair, we should be looking at average against average. (To make it really fair, I want to include all the dead peasants who died of infectious disease, but that is perhaps a bit tendentious!) I reckon the average mediaeval peasant is a bit stunted from childhood malnutrition, and has had a disease or two in his time, so he doesn't breathe quite so well as he did. I'll bet on the average corn-fed American over that guy, pudgy though they undoubtedly are.
"going through a situation prepares you to go through more like it" - First, I don't think this quite captures what toughness is. I think toughness is the ability to handle something significantly worse than the everyday. And second, as with the skill training examples above, I don't think it's really true, unless done as a very careful training program. Going underwater a lot *may* train you to be a better free diver. But 9 times out of 10 it's just going to train you to be dead. Getting hit *can* train you to accept blows, as part of a boxing or martial arts program; but in most situation it's just going to injure you. Example: My brother got punched in a mugging, and it didn't make him stronger, just agoraphobic and afraid to leave the house for a year or so.
I think this is a good point, and perhaps I would rephrase it to "going through a situation adapts you against such situations." I agree with you that this doesn't always mean you get tougher. Sometimes when you play guitar, you get calluses, and you get good. Sometimes you say "well darn, that hurts, and then go play piano." I think it probably depends on which is going on.
I think that there are many ways to structure a peasant v moderner showdown in unfair ways. For example, if we went off of age, you'd have a teenager facing off against a 38 year old. Yeah, if you include dead people, things get weird, because the average American is also dead, and dead at a very old age. So you'd have a very anticlimactic showdown between a 80 year old with a terminal disease vs a newborn baby. I think this probably just shows it was a bad point that's a bit nonsensical upon further consideration.
I would absolutely bet on the random American over the random medieval peasant if it was a pie-eating contest or rifle marksmanship challenge, due to the peasant's probable uncorrected vision problems, and near-certain lack of experience with firearms or functionally unlimited quantities of pie.
It's taken me all this time and argument to figure out what kind of a fallacy this is, but I think I've finally got there.
I don't know what the official name of this fallacy is, but it's of the form: if A implies B, then B implies A.
The tough guy fallacy starts with this premise: In order to get tough, you must go through some hard times. It draws the conclusion: If you go through hard times, then you get tough.
Now, I don't even agree with the premise, but you can see where it comes from: lots of skills and endurance abilities require hard training to achieve, and this hard training often feels unpleasant to the people who do it.
But in reality, lots of skills are acquired pleasurably. Music lovers learn an instrument because they enjoy it. People who do sport for fun often get fit while having a good time. Kids learn to read sitting on their parents' laps. So I don't think this premise holds.
But even if that premise is accepted, it's still clear that the conclusion doesn't follow. It's not the case that any hard time necessarily makes you stronger. Only certain kinds of carefully designed hard times do that.
I gave up on this review about halfway through. The writing is too disorganized and rambling, which is not a style I enjoy reading.
I do find the concept of a "human that can threaten AI" to be quite interesting, though. From what I can tell, the answer (in the novel) seems to be a form of genetic engineering. But can anyone recommend me some books that explore this concept? I.e. in order to be competitive with machines, humans have to start becoming more ambitious with their "biological" status.
It's good that you stopped, because also that interesting concept was wrong, in the sense that the reviewer didn't read very carefully and that wasn't what the book was talking about at all.
I'd recommend the Hyperion Cantos (four books) by Dan Simmons.
thanks I will look into that
> Today, those thoughts are old hat, but this book came out in 1981.
And the meaning of this fact still hasn't really hit this subculture in the face hard enough yet. He wasn't before his time, he was _at_ his time.
I swear to God. A subculture of autodidacts who never really thought about how uneducated that made them, and what very real implications that had for their ignorance. Discovering those books now, late in the plot, believing they were the main character or at least knew him.
God played a cruel trick on the SFBA Rationalists.
si tacuisses
Be careful. I got dinged* for suggesting people read newspapers.
*(I guess deservedly but in my defense I didn't know the rule about "true, kind and necessary two out three formulation")
You are right. mea culpa. I stand ready to expand on my comment, if any questions may arise. For now just two friendly hints: a) Reading fictional texts in a context different from the context they are written in, is not only legitimate, but unavoidable. No reader has exactly the same context as the author at her/his time of writing. Not even the author. As I have heard authors openly admit. (G.R. Martin may find it difficult to write the end of "A song of ice and fire" the same way he intended before it became GoT.)
b) what is the antonym of "autodidact"?
I have no problem whatsoever with what you wrote.
b) formally educated?
Appreciated. But the reader I commented with "si tacuisses" might feel less amused. And Scott A. disapproval of unkind+unhelpful comments is known and fully justified. - b) sounds too nice, considering "auto-didact" was said as a slight. Hetero-didact? Acolyte? School-boy? "force-fed information at the whim of others/ due to institutional consent"? Educated to form, not content - nor to ones own interests?
You're not a philosopher just because you sling Latin with a smug coy grin. In fact the pretense of the SFBA Rationalists, that they aspired to philosophy when they amounted to quackery, is precisely this sort of thin dress too scandalous to be formal and too clothed to be liberating.
Tell the story however you want. A good Liberal Arts education provides a _grounding_ in a common core of reading. You think people waste their time reading books in concentrated study, that suggests to me _envy_ not _superiority_.
You can't strip me of my credentials, vis a vis philosophizing, because I already know I'm in the vulgar online places. The fact that you think you have credentials is precisely the delusion I am gesturing towards.
Thanks for your willing participation, you expose your writing as farcical.
Speaking of sounding envious...
MD Scott Alexander Siskind got a formal degree in philosophy before he got a degree in medicine and psychiatry. All this after a very formal education in a very good formal school, where he excelled in English. The other authors in this part of the internet usu. also hold degrees, often "only" STEM, admittedly. I do have an M.A. in humanities. So what? "A good Liberal Arts education provides a _grounding_ in a common core of reading." I heard that claim before, not sure it's true. I did some reading, for sure. Again, so what? Shall we measure the heights of our piles of read tomes to conclude who is "better educated" - ein Schwanz-Vergleich? - Does ONLY a "good Liberal Arts education provides a _grounding_ in a common core of reading"? Are only people with an L.A. degree allowed to read and discuss Moby-Dick? - Anyway, you so smart and competent: Here is your chance to be be useful: Tell how exactly it is wrong to read a novel from year X in year Z to see how its ideas may apply to questions in year Z. Explain what Herbert wanted to show in his time (an interesting read, if done well), and in which specific places this review got specific things wrong. Please.
b) "Allodidact"?
I'm used to it, having written in politics in many of the online spaces associated with the SFBA Rationalists. A younger me thought they took their credo seriously, but they are just as vain and egotistical in their belief systems, as mechanical and hyena-like in their group dynamics, as any other posturing ballroom of would-be intellectuals. "If SFBA Rationalists are largely composed of quacks, I want to believe SFBA Rationalists are largely composed of quacks."
Turns out "true" and "necessary" are subjective, which is something that the SFBA Rationalist does not understand as they, tragically, tend to believe that they and they alone have apprehended an objective reality.
Autodidacts as opposed to... who exactly, of the non-autodidact variety?
Just plain educated people, man. Just plain educated people.
It's a pretty hilarious misread, and a pretty hilarious trick, from a certain point of view. "EY is Leto, this is about AI" is so wrong it made me happy, like "oh, those silly rationalists. Mostly Harmless, I guess".
That Mua'Dibs pun was awful and brilliant. I can only aspire to such wordsmithing. Kudos
As a casual aside, I wonder if Frank Herbert read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and got the idea of Hwi Noree from one of the female characters (Diaochan) because of the shared plot elements of an assassination plot against the ruler/emperor orchestrated by the opposition using a femme fatale as bait, involving a jealousy-induced betrayal by the emperor's right-hand man. Or maybe this is a more common plot device than I thought.
It's certainly common in Chinese history writing (or historical myth writing, which is what most premodern Chinese histories were). Xi Shi was used for the same purpose, at least. I feel like there were more, but I couldn't them on a couple of quick Googles.
lol I'm not versed in Chinese classical literature, but just happened to listen to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast a few weeks ago, so the similarities popped out.
I was never fond of the "Golden Path" stuff from the second book onwards. It felt like it squandered the themes of the first novel, about the dangers of heroic narrative and being swept along by forces beyond your control. Then we get to the 2nd and 3rd books, and it turns out we really did need the Hero after all - in fact, without him, humanity is going to go extinct!
I do like "God Emperor of Dune", though. Weird book, and often pretty funny. There's a running gag about how every time someone finds out that Leto is "getting married" to Hwi, they immediately look at his giant worm-body for genitalia - he eventually thinks that maybe he should have some big appendance grafted on to shock them.
Not a fan of the last two books either. Only good things in those were Miles Teg, weird child form Miles Teg, that surprisingly explicit sex scene from "Heretics", and the genuinely sad parts where you see a planet's biosphere get destroyed (I remember thinking that would have been more interesting if the project had failed because of unseen parasites/wildlife/etc that undermined it).
I rather liked the part in the second half of "Heretics" where they were skulking around on Gammu. The world -building felt almost Vancian. I wish he hadn't taken that swipe at "Star Wars", though.
I just...what? Totally bouncing off this one. There's too much inside-baseball, in both directions: I did read several of the __Dune__ series years and years ago, but wasn't all that interested in it, and definitely don't remember enough to understand all the references and implications here. And on the other side, either it's a really overstretched metaphor, or I'm *way* too ignorant about AI x-risk to see the connection. Just reads like excessive pattern-matching to me, the same way the review of __The Society of the Spectacle__ attempted to grant retroactive prescience credit to some dead French guy. Predicting the future is easy and common if you go looking for it...
Even aside from all that, I find it impossible to rank a book review of the lone fiction entry in an otherwise all-nonfiction field. Too hard to get over the (well-deserved imo) innate reflex to be really suspicious of Arguments from Fictional Evidence. And as the reviewer openly admits, this is a really unpopular book, even among those strictly evaluating it as typical scifi...
One last quibble:
>Nayla represents the balance of humanity’s nobility against its flaws
...who the hell is Nayla? That name isn't referenced anywhere else in the review.
The metaphor is not supported by the text. I find it almost numerological in its willingness to force this interpretation.
I also feel like the review makes a lot of mistakes assuming the reader has series and book knowledge. Nayla is the most glaring of these, but there are a lot of things that only make sense if you've *already* read the book.
Seeing Leto as a sort of AI is weird given Herbert's emphasis on human evolution.
The central theme of the entire Dune series is that natural selection ( Arrakis, Salusa Secundus) and artificial selection (Bene Gesserit, Siona) are a superior path to building machines (The Butlerian Jihad, Ix) or direct genetic engineering (Bene Tleilax). Leto has taken over the Bene Gesserit artificial selection plans and applied them until humanity surpassed him. That was his Golden Path. The successful assassination was Leto's own death-by-Siona long term plan.
This natural selection theme is also central to Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment where humans and aliens are isolated on a hostile planet for generations resulting in a population tougher and more capable than the general population softened by peace and prosperity
I also believe that it is FH's idea, but I think that it is really mistaken.
Natural selection does not select for "thougness", it selects for survival. For example, there are many unrelated human populations which are genetically very short. They have in common to live in very harsh environments with high mortality, especially from parasites. Their short stature is supposed to be advantageous in these environment because it allows them to reproduce a bit earlier, a good thing if you are going to die very young.
Basically, environments with a lot of mortality can select for many things depending on the cause of the mortality, and certainly not "thougness" as a general law.
Gwern has written a thorough criticism of Herbert's views on selection on his website.
Thank you, yes. This comment is a good statement of the actual themes of the book and series.
From the point of view of superintelligence risk, it doesn't matter all that much whether we build the superintelligence, genetically engineer it, or breed it - the potential downsides are largely the same. So I think it does make sense to consider Leto II as a superintelligence of the sort that AI safety advocates worry about, even if Frank Herbert wasn't interested in AI risk in the narrow sense.
It matters a great deal towards determining the character and form of the superintelligence, which in turn determines the nature of the effort to manage its risk. Eliezer and MIRI and the AI safety organizations are funded to manage a *specific* type of superintelligence risk in a *specific* way: programmed entities that need "alignment" work in their development.
It's a fallacy bordering on slick trickery to point to Herbert's work and say "See? He was worried about <general development of capabilities>, therefore we should fund <specific programming effort>".
It's particularly fallacious or slick because the fandom and literary analysis around this particular series has *already* settled the issue: there is always a shallow popular reading of Dune that says the Butlerian Jihad was about malicious AI, particularly since his son's books went in that direction, and there is *always* a consensus literary analysis that the Jihad was left intentionally vague because Herbert was more concerned about human capabilities and the negative effect of convenience technology. That is, it didn't matter to him whether we built superintelligence or just great iPhones and machine assistants, because either way he saw these things making too many of us mentally weak the same way the physical conveniences of his time had already made too many of us physically weak.
Simply: Herbert isn't about "someday mankind build robot God, robot God bad". He is about "mankind build car for legs, ride car everywhere, legs get weak, car bad. Oh no, someday mankind build car for brain, ride brain car everywhere, brain get weak... brain car bad!"
I'm entirely prepared to believe that the reviewer is wrong about the Butlerian Jihad, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether we can view Leto through the lens of superintelligence risk.
It's like the question of whether we can view Iron Man or C-3PO or Big Bird or Captain Hook through the lens of superintelligence risk. You can, you are allowed, but people who know the material are going to miss a beat and then look at you real funny.
None of those are remotely as good a fit.
I'm trying to use reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate that that's not true at all. A very glib surface reading of God Emperor of Dune makes it seem like a decent fit, but it's a famously obtuse book, so... the surface reading is wrong. Not "I think the author meant this" wrong, but "the author clearly says otherwise, you just weren't paying attention" wrong. So to someone who took the deeper reading, this looks like Big Bird. It looks very ridiculous.
"Oh no, someday mankind build car for brain, ride brain car everywhere, brain get weak... brain car bad!"
Plato wrote that Socrates was against writing, because it ruined people's memory and that it would lead people to misunderstand ideas because the person who created the ideas wouldn't be there to correct the misunderstandings.
And Frank Herbert was probably against this subculture. Gotta contend with it, rather than trying to pretend to ourselves otherwise.
Which (ideally none) of the other books in the series should I read before I read this one?
The first book is the best and most essential. There are worthwhile adaptations of it as well. I understood all the references in this review even though I’ve only read that first book, “Dune” - and that was many years ago
Thank you!
The first book, "Dune", is a classic in its own right, and has a lot of essential world-building information. Its core is the story of Leto's father's rise to power. I'd consider this essential, in large part because it will let you know which parts of GEoD are intended to be familiar and which parts are intended to be strange.
The second book, "Dune Messiah", is the story of Leto's father's fall from power. It introduces the prescience trap, imperial morality, Face Dancers, gholas, and ends with Leto's birth. The third book, "Children of Dune", is the story of Leto's rise to power. It introduces Leto at his most human, the Abomination trap, sandtrout, and the "Golden Path". I wouldn't call them "essential", but I truly don't know what GEoD would seem like without their context. Fortunately, they're shorter and more narratively straightforward than "Dune" or GEoD.
Actually, I'm now quite curious as to what GEoD would seem like, having skipped books 2 and 3. As described in the review, there's a character from "Dune", Duncan Idaho, who dies partway through. By the time of GEoD, they've figured out how to resurrect him (as a "ghola") with memories intact, but only the memories of his original life up until his original death. So in book 4, a new one of these gholas shows up, and as far as he's concerned, he skipped straight from the middle of "Dune" into one of the early chapters of GEoD. So maybe read "Dune" but stop when Duncan dies? ;-)
Thank you!
Two things: 1. AI is explicitly "done with" in the Dune-iverse: There had been an AI-war/luddite revolt, the Butlerian Jihad. Humans won. THAT story is: history. Thus the main (?) idea of this review - the story of "GEoD" as an allegory/mirror/prescient 1981 version of "YUDvsAI" - seems off by a wide margin.
2. Loved the review. Well written. 35 years since I read Dune, appreciate the memory. :D
To balance the comments, I think the AI analogy is reasonable and well argued.
Nice ending of a review of a book that I will never read.
However, the ending begs the question of why so many are afraid of an AI killing us all. We all know that mankind must go extinct sooner or later, so why not go with a bang rather than a long drawn-out whimper?
In the foreseeable future, humanity’s lot is to live in societies dominated by the old. That is, in (hopefully) safe and pleasant societies (the way old people like it), but also stagnant and sclerotic societies. Africa will be the last continent with zest and youthful vigor, but the demographic transition is in full swing there also, and 100 years from now even Niger will probably look like Japan. The future is old take-no-risks societies, not steampunk or fun dystopian Mad Max scenarios. More than 90 of the 194 countries in the world already have fertility rates below 2,1 (reproduction level), and the 60+ age group is the fastest-growing population group everywhere.
Given this likely, whimperish future, why not welcome a superior-being AI that kills us off and replaces us, since such an AI will be cleverer, and also better able to further explore Cosmos – since AI machines are likely to be better suited to millennium-type space travel than living organisms.
...not that I think such an AI event is ever to materialize, but if one for the sake of argument assumes that the superior-AI-is-coming people are right: Hell, why not go out with a Bang, since go we sooner or later must.
Release some new SARS-CoV-n variants and the gerontocracy will fall real fast.
I'm only partially kidding, and the "boomer pox" memes at the beginning of 2020 look like the start of a wider trend.
New virus might help, agree with that. As well as bacteria that are resistant to all antibiotics. Then, even minor surgeries will carry high mortality again.
But then again, humans have become really good at designing new counter-strategies in our never-ending arms race with virus and bacteria. Also, to be more relaxed with regard to illnesses that are fatal mainly among the old is considered ageism. "We do not have a 90 year old to lose", as was said during the recent covid-19 pandemic.
> is considered ageism
Sure, but should I care?
Not at all. I attempted to be ironic.
More seriously, if I were to write a scifi story, I would not choose a hybrid sand worm/human ruling Dune as the protagonist (a scenario I regard as only slightly less improbable than AI killing all of us here on Earth). I would instead describe what life is like when the global demographic transition has run its course, and all societies have the demographic profile as Japan, only more extreme. The protagonist should recognize the pleasantness of these societies - pleasant as a picture of water lilies in a stagnant pool. But also acknowledge the melancholy of gradual stagnation - like the drawn-out and ever-more distant roar of a once magnificent species. A bit like the Savage in Huxley's Brave New World.
I would further portray this pleasant-dystopian global society as an unintended side-effect of the triumph of Science. With a nod to Asimov, and how the Three Laws of Robotics ultimately leads to AIs preserving humans as a cossetted snowflake species, living in the totally risk-free environment created for them by mighty AI robots following the letters of the Laws.
Man, I feel like we are already so far down this path.
I want to take risks, I want to face death and win on my own terms.
And this society has gotten to the point where I got disciplined for "creating an unsafe work environment." by crushing a can of coke in my hand to demonstrate my impotent rage while complaining about how much I hate "safetyism."
May I suggest a novel with a theme a lot like that one?
https://www.amazon.com/Uploaded-Ferrett-Steinmetz/dp/0857667173
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
Related: My nutshell prediction concerning the evolutionary long-term dangers AI pose for humanity: AI will not kill us with a sword. But it may possibly crush us with a pillow.
From the footnote;
"Bene Gesserit were essentially witches who could draw on the ancestral memories of women in their ancestral line"
Yup.
"and they bred this ability into Paul, Leto’s father."
Nope, nope, noppity nope. This explicitly does not happen in Dune. Paul says "I'm not what they expected".
"As a bonus, they can also draw on male ancestor’s memories"
See above. This is apparently the actual point of the Bene Gesserit breeding program - to create a male version of a Reverend Mother, who has access to the Other Memories of the male line.
"as well as having a pretty good ability to predict the future and know what’s going on in the present."
Gawd.
The BG attempt to plan the future, not predict it, by examining the past - via Other Memory. They are aware that their methodology has a fatal flaw - they can only examine half of the past, hence the breeding program. Note what Paul's insight into the BG is in the testing scene early on in Dune, whilst the Atreides are still on Caladan - they do politics. Mohaim then says that the Spacing Guild does a form of higher mathematics.
Until Paul shows up, nobody is really aware of the capability of the spice to produce prescient visions.
These are fundamental errors in understanding the set up in Dune, let alone GEoD. As a consequence, it's difficult to take the review seriously.
You didn't read Dune very carefully. Paul does indeed have his male line Other Memory, and the Bene Gesserit are aware of prescience - Jessica asks RM Mohiam if she can use her limited prescience to see what will happen to the Atreides on Arrakis. The Fremen and the Spacing Guild also use spice for its prescience-granting effects, those effects are known.
"Jessica asks RM Mohiam if she can use her limited prescience to see what will happen to the Atreides on Arrakis."
This exchange?
J: "I ask only what you see in the future with your superior abilities."
M : "I see in the future what I've seen in the past."
I don't read that as being a reference to prescience, only Other Memory.
"Paul does indeed have his male line Other Memory". Whereabouts? I've certainly never noticed it.
The Guild, certainly. Paul claims he knows their secret after he changes the Water. But, it is their secret. Ergo, no-one outside the Guild realise. For the Fremen - same thing really. I think Paul suspects that they, as a people, have some very limited ability - in the Sietch Orgy scene? But again, the Fremen as a people, are either completely ignored by the Imperial society, or completely unknown. So, "nobody is really aware of the capability of the spice to produce prescient visions" stands up, I reckon.
1. I agree
2. I love your writing style. Would you ever do a review?
"She is as refined as her father, with none of his domestication."
Who is her father?
"Nayla represents the balance of humanity’s nobility against its flaws"
Unlike the other characters mentioned in this paragraph, this is your first time referencing Nayla. Was Nayla supposed to have a section?
"if AI is inevitable then the dominance of a specific AI is likely"
I know Robin Hanson disagress with this. In Dune, it's because machines in general have been suppressed so there wouldn't be any other AIs to compete with the first to emerge.
I read up to the part where it mentioned AI risk and then I rolled my eyes and stopped reading - nothing against the review or the reviewer. I have really enjoyed this blog and SSC before it for several years, though I’m not really a part of the hardcore rationalist base. But I haven’t made the mental switch to prediction markets and AI risk with everyone else. Sometimes the prediction markets reveal something interesting, but I am unable to make myself care about AI risk beyond enjoying Asimov’s robot stories. I cant bring myself to believe that it poses a real and imminent threat, and I tire of reading about it. Maybe it’s just me.
I'm all in on prediction markets, less interested in AI. Prediction markets actually exist, in limited form, and we can see how well calibrated they are. The AI people talk most about right now mostly seems like a toy and not something one would rely on to, say, make money by out-predicting those markets.
It is not just you. I have practical work experience in math and machine learning, and AI risk feels *very silly* to me. I don't care to support that feeling with discussion in the comments, but this other writer did a very good and entertaining job presenting the arguments against taking AI-risk seriously: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
He makes some good points but his "Argument from Slavic Pessimism" actually fits Eliezer's current predictions, and his "Argument from Complex Motivations" is completely unpersuasive to me, relying on fictional evidence and saying some outcome is "very likely" without reason for anyone else to consider it likely at all. The "Argument from Gilligan's Island" could have been persuasive if he cited "The Secret of Our Success" instead of a silly old sitcom that required its characters to fail in order to keep going.
Obviously it's not just you. But Scott is pretty big on AI risk and I'm fairly certain it's still his blog - most people who think the AI thing is somewhere between slightly exaggerated and utterly absurd probably keep quiet about it. Sure, there's some pushback, as there also is against rationalism more generally and EA more particularly, but much less than there would be if Scott had anti- AI risk views.
I kinda feel that a rationalist reading something non-AI and seeing AI metaphors is the equivalent of a medieval European scholar reading something pagan and seeing Christian metaphors, or Freud reading anything and seeing penises and vaginas. Literature is a giant Rorschach blot.
I definitely read the review as saying more about the rationalist community and less about the book. I've definitely seen examples of what you're talking about before, but this time it was a bigger leap in an area I'm more familiar with. Personally, I'm updating from "rationalists take AI-risk way too seriously" to "rationalists have religious blindness about AI-risk".
The Religion 2.0 take in the link you provided in your other comment is interesting. Maybe unfair to apply it too broadly, but at the core there is something there. In light of Scott’s prior post, it may not be true that non-believers will believe *anything*, but at least for some the urge to believe in *something* is strong, and rationalism/AI/transhumanism can fit the bill.
Interestingly, Robin Hanson was also commenting 3 days ago on AGI beliefs verging into pseudo-religion. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/08/agi-is-sacred.html
Oh, this is very good, thanks.
One interesting thing is the idea that AGI is no longer seen as rotting. This is an interesting deviation, because for science fiction author Vernor Vinge, who wrote the first popular books about both the singularity and malignant AI, rot was a given, and in fact rot was a crucial plot point for AGIs!
1. Imo, you have to put the author's full name in the first paragraph of a book review.
2. I read Frank Herbert's trilogy in the late 70s, probably because of the release of Children of Dune. I have a recollection of picking up God Emperor when it came out and putting it down after a dozen pages. After all these years I can't recall whether that was because it bored me, or the difference between being in college and high school, or because I just had more important things to read. Thankfully, this review confirms I probably didn't miss much.
If I'd seen "God Emperor of Dune, by the late Franklin Patrick "Frank" Herbert Jr." in the first paragraph of this review, I'd have laughed out loud.
The review misinterprets the book pretty badly, so I wouldn't take it as confirmation of anything. But God Emperor was a huge weird leap from "thoughtful space opera" to "the odd musings of an immortal", so you probably had the right sense of whether you wanted to make that leap or take the exit.
Is this book review superfluous or add much to the John Leanard NYTIMES review that came in 1981?https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/27/books/books-of-the-times-104040.html
I have previously suggested that properly evaluating book reviews might well require reading the underlying original text (revealing my great books educated snobbery I guess.) But I'm also thinking that an even stronger case could be made for not reinventing the wheel. Why new book reviews at all when there are old book reviews available?
Is it even more problematic when basically the review threads are being "subcontracted" out? At least John Leonard had his name on the byline, was being paid, and probably has some copyright interest in his review.
New book reviews that intentionally review the book with a different intended audience can do something useful for that audience that the old review couldn't. The review up here aims to provide an interesting discussion of how some of the themes of this book explore ideas that might be of interest to people with worries about AI alignment, which the old Times review didn't. The old Times review has the virtue of brevity, and (as suggested by the end) seems to be intended for an audience that has already read the first three books and is trying to figure out whether or not to read this one (and the answer I get is "if you're really obsessed you will have to read it, and if you're not, you probably should have stopped a few books ago").
I disagree with your characterization of the Two final books. I thought Chapterhouse Dune was basically an encounter with death, or rather a "final message before departing". Heretics was about the danger of autocratic control. But, of course, with any book what you see depends on what you bring to it.
With God Emperor you've certainly nailed major themes, though I disagree about it not having a plot. And I consider Dune Messiah to be the weakest book in the series. (I've only read it a couple of times.)
My takeaway from this review is, "We should build Optimus Prime then probably stop building autobots before we're sure humans alone could beat Decepticons," and I couldn't agree more.
If this silly misguided review supplants the actual book, and the rationalist community amounts to anything in the long run, then this review might be why we build The Torment Nexus (https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=en)
Review-of-the-review: 8/10
During the last book review season I mistook Scott's review of 1001 Nights for a contest submission and was like "wow, this is creative and unusually good, I might vote for it". This review feels like an attempt to recapture that, uh, magic. It's not as successful-- the attempt to draw lessons about AGI from it comes off as forced-- but I still enjoyed it. It strikes about the right balance of snark and appreciation for discussing Herbert's work (and Yudkowsky's). On the other hand it has noticeable weak points: it fails to question Herbert's silly notions of how a world might operate (e.g. the "hard times / strong men" meme that acoup.blog's "Fremen Mirage" series addresses) and the presentation is rough around the edges. On the whole I don't expect to be voting for it but I enjoyed reading it and might actually give the book a try (I've read the first three). As always, many thanks for contributing!
Reading this comment section - I'm going to get murdered if I mispronounce anything, aren't I...
Don't worry, no pronunciation guide was given, not even in the glossary or appendices of the first book! Fans can't even agree on how to pronounce the surname of the main villain. ;-P
"Of course, you can pronounce the words in Dune any way you wish" - Frank Herbert
https://twitter.com/SecretsOfDune/status/1471114944192069638
Wow, thanks!
...
He pronounced "sietch" like "C.H.", with two syllables??? Stress on the second??? Whoa.
Hwi Noree was one-dimensional in the extreme...but Herbert seemed to acknowledge that and claimed that she was designed that way.
Her one-dimension was being like an uber-empathic mirror.
Which lets her understand Leto (at least at some level), and after his 3500 years of loneliness, that is like an intoxicating, addictive substance to him.
And Leto realizes that it is a trap, and damns the Ixians and Tleilaxu for doing it...but then falls into the trap anyways.
It doesn't make Hwi Noree a more interesting character, but it makes her role in the story more tolerable.
Also, I kind of think that Leto let himself fall into that trap only because he successfully set Siona on her path.
The 'Good AI that coddles us and thereby makes us weak' is pretty much the crux of The Culture series by Iain Banks, which I love almost as much as the Dune series.
I think Herbert was far more thought provoking, and I kind of recoil at the thought of being the 'pets' of AI like the non-AI citizens of The Culture are....but Banks' books are also excellent.
Interestingly (at least to me), in Dune the goal is specifically to help humans develop superhuman abilities and spread forever.
In The Culture, humans being modified to become so intelligent that they even somewhat rival AIs is strongly frowned-upon as unwise, if not impossible.
That wasn't quite my take-away from the Culture. Most humans from the Culture are soft and useless, but it's fine; they don't need to be anything else. If the Culture existed in a Frank Herbert novel, their softness would doom them, but that doesn't happen in the stories they're actually in.
The humans aren’t pets. They can largely do what they want, it’s a benign AI scenario.
Well, humans can mostly do what they want, but only because the Minds choose to provide it for them.
> Imagine Leto as a very big Big Yud (Eliezer Yudkowsky, rationalism’s original AI doom-sayer);
Some rich projection going on here: Leto is nothing like Yud.
Yeah, that seemed forced.
Very enjoyable review!
We differ slightly in our reads of the main point of the book. I don't think it's a fragility-vs-robustness argument, but rather a fragility-vs-antifragility argument. The long time gap since the previous book lets him set up that robustness, in the end, doesn't matter. Even the Immortal God Emperors eventually get bored. Leto II has to keep cloning his Idahos just to have a reference point for his progress.
This isn't a juxtaposition of a humanity fragile to AI (baseline humans) versus robust to AI (humans with eugenic anti-AI weapons), but rather it's about the Scattering itself. Despite what Leto tells everyone except Siona, the Scattering is the real plan, the payoff of the Golden Path. That's why he lets her steal those documents at the beginning, so he can ensure an I Told You So many thousands of years in the future. Through Leto, Herbert articulates a view that homogenization (globalization?) and ease will make humanity fragile to *some* sort of existential threat, without any reasoning about what the existential threat would have to be. And Leto should think this; his father took over the Known Universe in a decade using only some superpowers and a childhood of training; and then Leto did the same thing a few years later! That's some serious tail risk. Herbert is making a Pareto/Taleb style argument for the experimentation itself, the Laboratory of the Scattering, as a hedge against an uncertain future. As Leto confides in Siona after making her drink from him, the point of the Golden Path is to make humanity rebel against it, scattering to the universe. In scattering humanity, in breeding in this hatred for sedentariness, Leto II believes he is securing a future for humanity by eliminating the possibility that any one future for humanity could dominate the wider human phenomenon. He's not condemned to be remembered as a mere dictator, he's actively playing that villain. He believes that will make people run so far and diversify so wide that they conquer the very idea of dictatorship. Yes, this strategy does protect against Butlerian AI - but not by being merely a little stronger in specific ways, but by the unpredictable variations and wonders that humanity will build for itself out of necessity and sheer churlishness. And, to cryptically hint at the later books, it works.
To use American mythological imagery, Leto II is King George III deliberately. He's creating a planned unplanned America, which will secure humanity against British-style stagnation. Or a Nero for Rome in Western imagery, letting Europe free to flourish free of Roman stagnation.
---------------------------------------
Also, it's true that the characters rant against rationalism, with the heroes being romantic and intuitive and sneering at the foibles of bureaucrats and other people who think they know things. Yet those same characters that the books lionize and who sneer at rationalism ... are often basically human computers, frequently are the product of long and deliberate breeding programs, and think in terms of conservation on the millennial scale. I think the books are a lot more ambivalent on rationalism, with their main complaint being people who get lost in the sauce.
*like*
Well this made me want to read the whole series mate.
>How much better would it then be if we could create an AI that restricts all other AI’s, but only as a secondary goal necessary to reach its primary objective of identifying what it is that makes humans human and amplifying those traits in a positive direction until we (as a still identifiably human race) can stand against AI’s on equal footing.
I mean why bother? Who cares at that point? A lot of this line of reasoning seems predicated on a value for human existence and mode of life that isn't really warranted.
It was never about AI. That theme followed from something Herbert encountered in his days, unfortunately something nobody seems to know much of these days. Look up his interviews on politics, Kennedy. Two core elements: strong man syndrome, and manipulation of participatory systems through automation. Herbert explored the impact of the Simulmatics Corporation.
Not thinking machines. But men embracing machines to be free, only to be enslaved by men owning the machines.
Herbert looked at humanity as a being. It's an organic perspective, an ecology of types and tests. Human behavioural biology meet human social psychology on a species level. The being continues to adapt, evolve, or it does. If the being adapts its environment to itself, the same problem follows as when the being destroys an environment. The analogy is of behaviour suitable for survival.
Diversification. The Golden Path was a constructed pressure valve set to burst. So that the being branches off in an ever expanding path of diversity. Never becoming subject to the pitfalls of conservative predispositions. Those leading only to status quo, providing a path of destruction of both being and environment.
AI. That's a theme the foundation rolled with simply because they were convinced to. By a breadwriter and a lobbyist. Ego did the rest.
this
I think that this might be the best review for no other reason than this: Mua’Dibs
I spit out my coffee and laughed even though it spattered on my screen.
Suprema! I read the entirety of Dune in the 90's and I still consider GE as setting the standard for epic scale novels. Your review is equally brilliant for mining the gems from Herbert's work. I still believe inspiration creates more insight than encumbered tour-de-force thought.
This novel was my favorite of the Dune series, though I understand why some people feel the opposite. A lot of Leto's ramblings are Frank's philosophical musings, which can get a bit mystical, or in his attempts to be poetic, end up being obscured or confusing.
I love a book that can make me think about it for years, and the more thought I put into this one, the more insights I uncover. Are they wholly mine, wholly Frank's insights, or something blended? Almost doesn't matter ... he succeeded in sparking my mind into motion.
Here's some of the better bits:
-Theme: Hard times make people strong. Sure, but there's something deeper, under the surface of that theme. Strength is always relative, and musings on the species interesting, but let's bring it down from the epic level of the human race to you personally. Frank is saying: You seek enough foresight and knowledge on your world to assert control. You think you want to escape uncertainty, and thereby find some level of peace. But humans have been evolved to be explorers, adventurers. We are at our best when forging ahead into the uncertainty, when adapting to the unknown. You will not be fulfilled by anything less.
-Leto isn't seeking to make humanity "stronger", he's seeking to adapt them to an upcoming threat he can see through prescience. The threat is prescience itself, mechanized or otherwise, locking humanity into a future course from which there is no escape. Humanity that escapes prescience itself has gained back what Leto already lost: free will. Therefore he intentionally acts like a predator on the entire species to force an adaptation against his prescience. He knows he has succeeded only when his prey can destroy him. In this, he completely succeeds.
-A predator must seem cruel to the prey, and Leto hates this fact and hates the personal cost of losing his humanity. He remembers past lives enduring such catastrophes as he must inflict to force humanity to adapt, so he knows the cost in suffering. He knows he will be hated for it. The pain of what he must do, has been doing for thousands of years makes him the best tragic hero in SF.
-Whether Leto is wrong, right, or his values just too alien, what he wants is for humanity to resist him. Those of you who hate him are having the exact reaction he wants for people to have to him. Duncan Idaho is a proxy for the reader. Frank keeps bringing you back to the same lessons, but instead of just telling you directly, he wants for you to unfold the mystery for yourself. Exactly how Leto treats Duncan. On some level it really feels arrogant and condescending, but you have to concede a point to Frank that this will get some people to think about it.
I'm in awe of how insightful and well-written this book review is (and other finalists as well). Why is amateur hour so much better than what the professionals produce?
That said,
"But if AI is inevitable then the dominance of a specific AI is likely;" -- I think literally everyone in the world but me who's interested in AI risk makes this assumption, and I think it's a terrible, terrible assumption, which blinds us to the best approaches to making AI "safe".
This assumption projects a human understanding of consciousness onto AIs. What does"singleton" even mean? Even the human brain doesn't implement a single person, in the sense of having a single consciousness which directs all of its cognitive computation. Our brains do a great deal of very clever computation which we're never aware of, and even that which we are aware of can dissociate into independent competing thought processes under times of extreme stress (or at least, I myself once subjectively experienced this).
A singleton would be massively distributed, and many of its sub-processes would be at least as complex as humans, and largely locally information-encapsulated, for efficiency of data transfer. Either there are supernatural spirits, or whatever gives rise to consciousness in our brains would give rise to consciousness in these sub-processes. There is no law of nature saying that the consciousness of an entity rules out the consciousness of its components. Or, perhaps there is such a law of "nature", if we read "nature" as "organic, evolved nature", which requires individuals sufficiently disconnected for competition between them to drive evolution. But it will not apply to AI.
It seems likely that the most-efficient structure for a singleton will be one which uses free-market and evolutionary competition among its sub-processes, delegating nearly all computation to very low-level processes. Such a singleton won't be a singleton at all. It would be more correct to think of that singleton as the United Nations, coordinating nations, which supervise states, which supervise counties, which supervise cities and districts, which supervise groups, which supervise conscious agents. If there's anything anywhere in that structure that will be conscious, I think it's most likely to be at a very *low* level, where agents process very local information at great depth. The higher-level processes must deal with data at such a high level of abstraction, and so physically dispersed, that if they experience consciousness, it will not be one that can be mapped onto physical space.
In any case, I don't think there's any justification for believing that the notion of a "singleton AI", conceived of as a single consciousness with a single will and set of values, is coherent, in the sense of corresponding to anything likely to be constructable and stable.
This means that we aren't justified in believing that an AI singleton would be a bad thing. It might be a new, very different society, containing moles of agents something like us, with consciousness, values, and desires.
And this is the important thing--figuring out how to guide AI development in a way that preserves consciousness, worthy values, and enough desires to keep things interesting. The idea that trying to preserve literal human life, not evolving or growing, but merely out-fucking death forever, is *altruistic* rather than *incredibly selfish*, is idiotic. Saying "Humanity above all!" is even worse than saying "Deutschland über alles!" It's just bigotry taken one level of abstraction further, and made orders of magnitude more evil for wanting to stop evolution.
Great. Now I’m going to go read this stupid book again. You made it sound way better than I remember it being. :)
Human worm hybrid? Yuk
"In the past, this tactic has resulted in various people realizing the necessity of Leto’s actions and joining his team. Siona, however, is not convinced."
That's wrong / someone has wrong memories about the book. Siona sees the Golden Path and agrees to Leto's plan - assassinating him is actually part of it, she agrees to it and commences the whole thing.
I don't know about winning the contest, but "It’s like Frank Herbert was worried you’d mistake him for the Reasonably Tough Emperor of Dune and over-corrected in the other direction" is a strong competitor to win the "best *sentence* in an ACX Book Review" contest.
Thanks reviewer! I already loved the book itself, yet never thought of your grid of reading. Fun and full of food for thoughts!