On the Origins of Dune's Butlerian Jihad

Nearly one hundred years before Frank Herbert published “Dune” and teased its Butlerlian Jihad—the Great Revolt against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots that some humans used to enslave humanity (who were, in turn, enslaved by a "god of machine-logic")—there was the Butler that inspired it all: Samuel Butler, a 19th century English novelist who was one of the earliest thinkers to try and apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to the possibility of machine intelligence.

In 1863, four years after "On the Origins of Species” was published, Butler sent a letter to the editor published in The Press, a New Zealand daily newspaper, titled "Darwin among the Machines.” In it, Butler posits that machines could be thought of as "mechanical life" undergoing evolution that might make them, not humans, the preeminent species of Earth:

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

Butler was looking at the monstrous wake of the Industrial Revolution, struggling with the implications of Darwin’s theory, and concluded that the evolutionary pressures advancing machines were even more intense than humans—happening on much shorter timescales that yielded much more dramatic effects because of our intervention—suggesting that consciousness and intelligence would eventually arise. Our succession was a foregone conclusion: the question then was how, not when. What would bring that day to pass?

Butler writes:

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

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