Talk:Butlerian Jihad

Just curious...
Quote: " Even the simplest computers and calculators were banned, with the penalty for building or owning such a thinking machine technology being put to trial and sentenced to immediate death"

But were they in reality? Even after the Jihad the Empire remained technologically advanced civilasation with interstellar capacity. Thing like, say, orinthopters or fold-space drives require CPU control to function at all. Mechanical CPU control can be replaced by human brain, but that requires something radically different than mentat order training (mentats were trained to be advisors and strategists first of all), this would require you to take a cloned human (or, criminal condemned to death), then lobotomize and mind wipe him, then remove "not needed anymore" parts - like extremities, digestal tract and sensory organs and hard-wire the brain to machinery. Such practices seem not known in Dune universe.

My bet, due to Ixian navigational machines, for example, referanced as "not formally violating anti-AI commandments", is on that a computer device would be perfectly tolerable even under Butlerian Jihad anti-AI rules, it the following three criteria are met:

1) it is not a self-aware intelligence (e.g. not "a machine in likeness of human mind" or a true AI)

2) it does not have an ability to enhance itself (as such it could not become a true AI over time)

3) it its constructed to accompish a set specific task (for example, of controlling the movements of orinthopter wing in flight or doing mathematical calculations, of for example the total price of purchase from a merchant)

or something like that ..... 178.70.164.159 09:09, January 25, 2015 (UTC)