Timber 🎃

The Dune movies never really explain one of the strangest things about the Dune movies. They have spaceships, but no computers. 10,000 years before Paul Atreides, humans did exactly what we're doing right now. They created thinking machines and handed everything over to them. Their work, their choices, and eventually their freedom. It went so badly that humanity launched a holy war against the machines across the universe. And humanity won. So they wrote one law into all their religions: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." But you can't run an interstellar empire without computing power. So they trained people instead. Mentats are humans raised from childhood to think like computers. Navigators use the spice to plot safe paths through space. The Bene Gesserit spend generations perfecting the human mind and body. Basically, every superpower in Dune exists because computers don't exist in Dune. And my favorite thing about Dune is also the most terrifying thing about Dune. That’s not the future without AI, it’s the future after AI. Herbert wrote that in 1965.