What Happened To The Thinking Machines In The Dune Universe

This post contains spoilers for Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novel series.

The rise and fall of Paul Atreides might be the beating heart of the “Dune” saga, but Frank Herbert’s painstakingly rich, vibrant worldbuilding eclipses its protagonists. Change is constant in the “Dune” universe, where events span distant planets and galaxies; where emperors, messiahs, tyrants, and shadowy forces take turns to shape an uncertain future. Around 10,000 years before the events of “Dune,” a war was waged against a technocratic class and their “machines-that-think,” which completely destroyed (and erased) their legacy and rebuilt society from the ground up. This extermination campaign that led to computers and artificial intelligence being banned in the Known Universe forever, came to be known as the Butlerian Jihad, or the Great Revolt, which is glimpsed in HBO’s “Dune: Prophecy.” 

It is critical to distinguish the outlawed machines in “Dune” from our general understanding of the term. The term “thinking machine” was used to describe any form of artificial intelligence with sentience and autonomy, be it in the form of supercomputers or conscious robots. The rise of these thinking machines was inevitable with the level of technological advancements that blossomed across the Known Universe, but machine intelligence soon took oppressive forms that were detrimental to humanity itself. Humanity’s answer to this pervasive technocracy was religious fanaticism (hence the term “jihad”) as spiritual faith was considered antithetical to cold machine logic. While Frank Herbert’s original novel series only refers to the Butlerian Jihad in passing, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson explored it more deeply in “Dune: The Butlerian Jihad,” which is considered a part of the series’ expanded universe.

Let look first Frank Herbert’s exploration of the Great Revolt and then move on to what the expanded universe has to say about this historical event set in the world of “Dune.”

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” 

This quote from “Dune” sums up the catalyst of the Great Revolt, which insisted on humanity setting their own guidelines to remake the world (something machines were believed to be incapable of, despite their sentience). What started as justified discontent quickly spiraled into religion-fueled hysteria, which encouraged indiscriminate hatred toward anything mechanical in nature. With the complete uprooting of technology, human civilization underwent a reversal, creating a gaping void that needed to be filled by something completely reliant on human intelligence.

By 108 B.G. (Before Guild), the mentat order was created to deal with this void. “Mentat” was a discipline developed specifically to replace machine intelligence, and humans who displayed the cognitive capacity to think at the same level as computers were granted this title. For instance, Thufir Hawat, who loyally served the Atreides centuries later, proved indispensable for his mentat abilities, which were equivalent to that of a supercomputer. Along with mentats, the all-female Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild of Navigators were established to prevent civilization from regressing to a primordial state. But were these organizations enough to fill the gaps left by the machines?

This question was partly answered by the rise of a new political system, with the Padishah Emperor from House Corrino acting as the enforcer of a feudal galactic order backed by the Great House and key organizations (including the Bene Gesserit). This system lasted thousands of years until Paul Atreides crowned himself Emperor in 10196 and set another violent holy war in motion.

The “Dune” expanded universe, along with parts of “The Dune Encyclopedia” (which includes a foreword by Frank Herbert himself), trace the “Butlerian” etymology to Manion Butler the Innocent, whose death was the catalyst for the Great Revolt. Long story short, an independent robot named Erasmus killed the newborn Manion to get his mother Serena’s attention, throwing the child from the top of a tower. Serena, in her rage-fueled despair, destroyed a thinking machine guard in retaliation, and the cruelty of this child murder instigated an uprising that eventually led to the holy war against machines. Soon after, Manion was deemed a spiritual martyr, and a religious cult was birthed around Serena, further fueling a newfound obsession with faith and religion.

Serena’s rage became the face of the revolt, garnering the support of humans who were subjugated by robots like Erasmus up until this point. In retaliation, the thinking machines, who were led by Omnius Prime — the title held by the most influential of AI entities among the Omnius — unleashed a plague that wiped out billions of humans. These events took place on a rapidly declining Earth, which was on the cusp of becoming inhabitable as the war kept raging. Once Earth became completely irradiated due to atomic warfare and natural disasters, the Battle of Corrin (fought on the planet Corrin) emerged as the turning point that helped erase thinking machines once and for all.

Although Frank Herbert used brief mentions of the Great Revolt to underline the themes of cyclical oppression, the expanded universe helps fill in gaps to draw deeper parallels between the machine war and the holy war Paul wages centuries later. While few “Dune” adaptations tackle the machine war head-on, it is a narrative strand that is worth revisiting time and again.