Butlerian jihad

• Butlerian Jihad

From Butlerian +‎ jihad (“holy war, crusade”), from the science fiction epic Dune (1965). Butlerian refers to English novelist Samuel Butler, whose 1872 work Erewhon describes a society that destroys all complex machines preemptively out of fear of their replacement by those very machines.^[1]

Butlerian jihad (plural Butlerian jihads)

1. (science fiction) A war waged in the Duneverse by the last free humans against autonomous (“thinking”) machines; the Great Revolt.
   • 1965, Frank Herbert, Dune, New York: Ace Books, →OCLC, page 18:

     “‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind,’” Paul quoted.
     “Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should've said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’

   • 2003, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, The Butlerian Jihad (Legends of Dune), London: New English Library, →ISBN, page 3:

     At the time of the Butlerian Jihad, Omnius and his thinking machines had held all of the “Synchronized Worlds” in an iron grip for a thousand years.

   • 2021 October 18, Alison Flood, “Dune: science fiction’s answer to Lord of the Rings”, in The Guardian‎^[2], →ISSN, archived from the original on 1 August 2022:

     Dune holds up today, says writer Alastair Reynolds, when many science fiction novels of its era don’t, in part because [Frank] Herbert future-proofed it, by setting his story 20,000-odd years ahead, after the “Butlerian Jihad” has replaced intelligent machines with human minds.

2. (by extension, artificial intelligence) A notional large-scale and vehement opposition to and suppression of artificial intelligence.
   • 2025 May 15, Ross Douthat, “An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse”, in The New York Times‎^[3], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 21 May 2025:

     Well, Daniel Kokotajlo, thank you so much. And I will see you on the front lines of the Butlerian Jihad soon enough.

• Previously, this term was little known outside the context of the Dune science fiction franchise. It has since gained traction as a term in popular culture with the advent of powerful commercially-available machine-learning text-, image- and video-generating AIs in the early to mid-2020s.

• Erewhonian

• Dune (franchise) § Butlerian Jihad on Wikipedia.Wikipedia