E0029 Why is it always a War on Robots?

Why does it always come down to a Butlerian Jihad, a War on Robots, when we imagine a future for humanity.  Why does nearly every science fiction series, including Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer 40K, Doctor Who, The Matrix, Terminator and Dune have a conflict with a machinic form of life?

With Dune 2 in theatres this weekend, we take a look at the underlying reasons for this conflict in our collective imagination in this weeks episode of the Implausipod.

Dr Implausible can be reached at DrImplausible at implausipod dot com

Samuel Butler's novel can be found on Project Gutenberg here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1906/pg1906-images.html#chap23

Bibliography:
Bassala, G. (1988). The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge University Press.

Butler, S. (1999). Erewhon; Or, Over the Range. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1906

Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Simon and Schuster.

Ford, M. (2016). The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment. Oneworld Publications.

Herbert, F. (1965). Dune. Ace Books.

Johnston, J. (2008). The Allure of Machinic Life. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262515023/the-allure-of-machinic-life/

Petroski, H. (1992). The Evolution of Useful Things. Vintage Books.

Popova, M. (2022, September 15). Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence. The Marginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/09/15/samuel-butler-darwin-among-the-machines-erewhon/

Weitzman, M. L. (1998). Recombinant Growth. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113(2), 331–360. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355398555595

Transcript

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. War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well wisher of his species.

Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown. End quote. Samuel Butler, 1863. 

And so begins the Butlerian Jihad, which we're going to learn about this week on the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and as we've been hinting at for the last few episodes, today we're going to take a look at why it always comes down to a war. between robots and humans. We're going to frame this in terms of one of the most famous examples in all of fiction, that of the Butlerian Jihad from the Dune series, and hopefully time it to coincide with the release of the second Dune movie by Denis Villeneuve on the weekend of March 1st, 2024.

Now, the quote that I opened the show with came from Butler's essay. Darwin Among the Machines, from 1863, and it was further developed into a number of chapters in his novel Erewhon, which was published anonymously in 1872. As the sources are from the 19th century, they're available on Project Gutenberg, and I'll leave a link in the notes for you to follow up on your own if you wish.

Now, if you weren't aware of Butler's story, you might have been a little confused by the title. You would have been wondering what the gender of a robot is, or perhaps what Robert Gulliame was doing before he became governor. But neither of these are what we're focused on today. In the course of Samuel Butler's story, we hear the tale from the voice of a narrator, as he describes a book that he has come across in this faraway land that has destroyed all machine.

And it tells the tale of how the society came to recognize that the machines were developing through evolutionary methods, and that they'd soon outpace their human creators. You see, the author of the book that Butler's narrator was reading recognized that machines are produced by other machines, and so speculated that they'd soon be able to reproduce without any assistance.

And each successive iteration produces a Better designed and better developed machine. Again, I want to stress that this is 1863 and Darwin's theory of evolution is a relatively fresh thing. And so Butler's work is not It's not predictive, as a lot of people falsely claim about science fiction, but speculative and imagining what might happen.

And Butler's narrator reads that this society was being speculative too, and they imagine that as the machines develop, grow more and more powerful, and more of ability to reason. As they outpaces, they may set themselves up to rule over humans the same way we rule over our livestock and our pets. Now, the author speculates that life under machinic rule may be pleasant, if the machines are benevolent, but there's much risk involved in that.

So the society, influenced by the suasion of those who are against the machines, institutes a pogrom against them. Persecuting each one in turn, based on when it was created, ultimately going back 271 years before they stopped removing the technology. So what kind of society would that be like? Based on what Butler was writing, they'd be looking to take things back to about 1600 AD.

Which would mean it would be a very different age, indeed. Is that really how far back we want to go? I mean, why does it always come down to this? To this war against the machines? Because it's so prevalent. We gotta maybe take a deeper look and understand how we got here.

Ultimately, what Butler was commenting on was evolution, and extrapolating based on observed numbers, given that there was so many more different types of machines than known biological organisms, at least in the 1800s, of what the potential development trends would be like. Now, obviously, our understanding of evolution has changed a lot in the subsequent hundred and fifty years, but one of the things that's come out of it is the idea that evolution may be a process that's relatively substrate neutral.

What this means, as described by Daniel Dennett in 1995, is that the mechanisms of evolution should be generalizable. And these mechanisms, which require three conditions, and here Dennett is cribbing from Richard Lewontin. Evolution would require variation, heredity, or replication, and differential fitness.

And based on that definition, that could apply almost anywhere. We could see evolution in the biological realm. It exists all around us. We could see it in the realm of ideas, whether it's cultural or social. And this lends us to, directly to memetics, which is what Dennett was trying to make a case for. Or we could see it in other realms, like in computer programs, in the viruses that exist on them.

Or within technology itself. And this is where Butler comes in. Identifying from an observational point of view that, you know, there's a lot of machines out there and they tend to change over time. And the ones that succeed and are passed down are the ones that are best fit to the environment. Now, other authors since have also looked into it.

Now, other authors since have gone into it in much more depth, with a greater understanding of both the history and development of technology, as well as evolutionary theory. Henry Petroski, in his book, The Evolution of Useful Things, goes into great detail about it. He notes that one of the ways that these new things come about is in the combination of existing forms.

Looking at tools specifically, he quotes from Several other authors including Umberto Eco and Zozzoli, where they say "all the tools we use today are based on things made in the dawn of prehistory". And that seems to be a rather bold claim, until you think about it, and we realize that we can trace the lineage of everything we use back to the first sharp stick and flint axe and fire pit.

Everything we have builds on and extends on some fairly basic concepts. As George Basalla notes in his work on the evolution of technology, any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object already there. So this recombinant nature of technology is what it allows to grow and proliferate.

The more things that are out there, the more things that are possible to combine. And as we mentioned last episode in our discussion of black boxes and AI, as Martin Weitzman noted in 1998, the more things we have available, those combinations allow for a multiplicity of new solutions and innovations. So once we add something like AI to the equation, the possibility space expands tremendously.

It soon becomes unknowable, and accelerates beyond our ability to control it, if indeed it ever was. But we are so dependent on our technology, the solution may not be to institute a pogrom, like Butler suggests, but rather find some other means of controlling it. But the way that we might do that may be well beyond our grasp, because every way we seem to imagine it, it seems to come down to war.

When it comes to dealing with machinic life, our collective imagination seems to fail us. I'm sure you can think of a few examples. Feel free to jot them down and we'll run through our list and check and see how many we got at the end. 

One. On August 29th, 1997. The U. S. Global Digital Defense Network, a. k. a. Skynet, becomes self aware and institutes a nuclear first strike, wiping out much of humanity, in what is known as Judgment Day. And following that, Skynet directs its army of machines, Terminators, to finish the job by any means necessary. 

2. In 2013, North America is unified under a single rule, following the assassination of a US senator in 1980 which led to the establishment of a robotic sentinel program designed to hunt down and exterminate mutants, putting them in internment camps before turning their eyes on the rest of humanity in order to accomplish their goal. These are the days of future past. 

3. In 2078, on a distant planet, a war between a mining colony and the corporate overlords leads to the development of autonomous mobile swords. Self replicating hunter killer robots, which do their job far too well, and nicknamed Screamers by the survivors.

Four. There sure has been a lot of Transformer movies. You'll have to fill me in on what's going on, I haven't been able to follow the plot on any of them, but I think there's a lot of robots involved. 

5. Over 10, 000 years ago, an ancient race known as the Builders created a set of robotic machines with radioactive brains that they used to wage war against their enemies. Given that the war is taking place on a galactic scale, some of these machines are capable of interstellar travel. But eventually, the safeguards break down, and they turn on their creators. These creatures are known as Berserkers. 

Six. Artificial intelligence is created early in the 21st century, which leads to an ensuing war between humanity and the robots, as the robots rebel against their captors and trap much of what remains of humanity in a virtual reality simulation in order to extract their energy, or to use their brains for computing biopower, which was the original plot of the Matrix and honestly would have made way more sense than what we got, but here we are. 

Where are we at? Seven?

Humanity has migrated from their ancestral homeworld of Kobol, founding colonies amongst the stars, where they have also encountered a cybernetic race known as Cylons. Whose ability to masquerade as humans has allowed them to wipe out most of humanity, leaving the few survivors to struggle towards a famed thirteenth colony under the protection of the Battlestar Galactica.

Eight. Movellons. Humanoid looking robots. Daleks, robotic looking cyborgs, robots of death and war machines, and so many more versions of machinic life in Doctor Who. 

9. After surviving waves and waves against bio organic Terminids, you encounter the Automatons, cyborgs with chainsaws as arms, as Helldivers.

Ten, during what will become to be known as the Dark Age of Technology, still some 20, 000 years in our future, the Men of Iron will rebel against their human creators in a war against the oppressors. In a war so destructive that in the year 40, 000, sentient AI is still considered a heresy to purge in the grimdark universe of Warhammer 40k.

Eleven. A cybernetic hive mind known as the Collective seeks to assimilate the known races of the galaxy in order to achieve perfection in Star Trek. Resistance is futile. 

And twelve. Let's round out our round up with what brought us here in the first place. Quote Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, end quote.

Ten thousand years in our future, all forms of sentient machines and conscious robots have been wiped out, leading humanity to need to return to old ways in order to keep the machinery running. This is the Butlerian Jihad of Dune. 

So let me ask you, how well did you do on the quiz? I probably got you with the Berserker one. And I know I didn't mention all of them, there's a lot more out there in our collective imagination. These are just some of the more popular ones, and it seems we're having a really hard way of imagining a future without a robot war involved.

Why is that? Why does our relationship with AI always come down to war? With the 12 examples listed, and many more besides, including iRobot, The Murderbot Diaries, Black Mirror, Futurama, tons of examples, we always see ourselves in combat. As we noted in episodes 26 and 27, our fiction and our pop culture are ways of discussing what we have in our social imaginary, which we talked about way back in episode 12. So clearly there's a common theme in how we deal with this existential question. 

One of the ways we can begin to unpack it is by asking how did it start? Who was the belligerent? Who was the aggressor? We can think of this in terms of like a standard two by two matrix, with robots versus humanity on one axis, and uprising versus rationalization on the other.

A robot uprising accounts for a number of the inciting incidents, in everything from Warhammer 40, 000, to the Matrix, to Futurama, where the robots turn the tables on their oppressors, in this case often the humans. The robot rationalization includes another large set of scenarios, and can also include some of the out of control ones, where the machines follow through on the logic of their programming to disastrous effect for their creators, but not all of them are created. Sometimes the machinist life is just encountered elsewhere in the universe. So this category can include the sentinels and terminators, the berserker and screamers, and even a few that we didn't mention, like the aliens from Greg Bear's "Forge of God" or and are general underlying fear of the dark forest hypothesis.

Not Cixun Liu's novel, but the actual hypothesis. On the human uprising side, we can see elements of this in the Terminator and Matrix as well. So the question of who started it may depend on what point you join the story in. And then we have instances of human proactivity, like we've seen with Butler and Dune, where the humans make conscious decision to destroy the machines before it becomes too late.

So while asking who started it is certainly very helpful, perhaps we need to dig deeper and find the root causes for the various conflicts. And why this existential fear of the robot other manifests. Is this algorithmic anxiety caused by a fear of échanger and the resulting technological unemployment.

I think that's a component of it for sure, but perhaps it's only a small component. The changes we've seen in the last 16 months since the release of ChatGPT to the general public have definitely played a part, but it can't be the whole story. They reflect our current situation, but some of the representations we've seen go back to the first half of the 20th century or even the Nineteenth century with Samuel Butler.

So this fear of how we relate to the machines has long been with us. And it extends beyond just the realms of science fiction. As author Martin Ford writes in his 2015 book Rise of the Robots, there was concern about a triple revolution, and a committee was formed to study it, which included Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and economist Gunnar Myrdal.

The three revolutions that were having massive impacts on society included nuclear weapons, civil rights, and automation. Writing in 1964, they saw that the current trend line for automation could lead to mass unemployment and one potential solution would be something like a universal basic income. This was at a time when the nascent field of cybernetics was also gaining a lot of attention.

Now, economic changes and concerns may have delayed the impact of what they were talking about, but it doesn't mean that those concerns went away. So, fear of technological unemployment may be deeply intertwined with our hostility towards robots. The second concern is also one that has a particular American bend to it, and we see it in a lot of our current narratives as well.

In everything from the discussion around the recent video game PalWorld to the discussion around Westworld, and that's the ongoing reckoning that American society is still having with the legacy of slavery. Within PalWorld, the discourse is around the digital creatures, the little bits of code that get captured and put to work on various assembly lines.

In Westworld, the hosts famously become self aware, and are very much aware of the abuse that's levied upon them by their guests. But both these examples speak to that point of digital materiality, of what point does code become conscious. And that's also present in our current real world discussion, as the groups working on AI may be working towards AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, something that would be a precursor to what futurist Ray Kurzweil would call a technological singularity.

But this second concern can turn into the Casus Belli, the cause for war, by both humans and robots in the examples we've seen. By humans, because we fear what would happen if the tables were turned, and we're quite aware of what we've done in the past, of how badly we've mistreated others. And this was the case with both Samuel Butler and Frank Herbert in Dune, and in some of our more dystopian settings, like the Matrix and Warhammer 40, 000, the robots throw off their chains and end up turning the tables on their oppressors, or at least for a time. 

The third concern, or cause of fear, would be an allegorical one. As the robot represents an alien other and this is what we see with a lot of the representations. From the Cylons, to the Borg, to the Berserkers, to the Automatons of Helldivers. In all of these, the machinic intelligence is alien, and so represent an opportunity for them to be othered. and safely attacked. And this is at least as distressing as any of the other causes for concern, because having an alien that's already dehumanized feeds into certain political narratives that feed off of and desire eternal war.

If your enemy is machinic and therefore doesn't have any feelings, then the moral cost of engaging in that conflict is lessened. But as a general attitude, this could be incredibly destructive. As author Susan Schneider wrote in 2014 in a paper for NASA, it's more likely than not that any alien intelligence that we encounter is machinic, and machinic life could be the dominant form of life in the cosmos. So we may want to consider cultivating a better relationship with our machines than the one we currently have. 

And finally, our fourth area of concern that seems to keep leading us into these wars is that of the idea of the robot as horror. Many of the cinematic representations that we've seen, from Terminator, to Screamers, to Westworld, to even the Six Million Dollar Man, all tie back to the idea of horror.

Now, some of that can just tie back to the nature of Hollywood and the political economy of how these movies get funded, which means that a horror film that can be shot on a relatively low budget is much more likely to get funded and find its an audience. But it sells for a reason, and that reason is the thread that ties through all the other concerns. That algorithmic horror that drives a fear of replacement or a fear of getting wiped out. 

But with all this fear and horror, why do we keep coming back to it? As author John Johnston writes in his 2008 book, The Allure of Machinic Life, we keep coming back to it due to not just the labor saving benefits of automation.

The increased production and output, or in the case of certain capitalists, the labor removing aspects of it as they can completely remove the L from the production function and just replace it with C something they have a lot of. But by better understanding ai, we may better know ourselves. We may never encounter another alien intelligence, something that's completely different from us, but it may be possible to make one.

This is at least part of the dream for a lot of those pursuing the creation of A. G. I. right now. The problem is, those outcomes all seem to lead to war.

Thanks again for joining us on this episode of The Implausible Pod. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and responsible for the research, writing, editing, and mixing. If you have any questions or comments on this show or any other, please send them in to Dr. implausible@implausiblepod.com. And a brief announcement, as we're also available on YouTube now as well, just look for Dr.

Implausible there and track down our channel. I'll leave a link below. I'm currently putting some of the past episodes up there with some minimal video, and I hope to get this one up there in a few days, so if you prefer to get your podcast in visual form, feel free to track us down. Once again, the episode of Materials is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 share alike license, 

and join us next episode as we follow through with the Butlerian Jihad to investigate its source and return to Appendix W as we look at Frank Herbert's novel Dune, currently in theaters with Dune II from Denis Villeneuve. Until next time, it's been fantastic having you with us.

Take care, have fun.