Butlerian jihad

English

Alternative forms

  • Butlerian Jihad (alternate letter-case form)

Etymology

By surface analysis, Butlerian +‎ jihad (“holy war, crusade”). Named after the book Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, in which a war—namely, the Butlerian Jihad—is being waged by the last free humans against autonomous machines.

The term “Butlerian” refers to English novelist Samuel Butler. In Butler's 1872 work Erewhon, a society destroys all complex machines preemptively out of fear of their replacement by those very machines.[1]

Noun

Butlerian jihad (plural Butlerian jihads)

  1. (sociopolitics) A notional large-scale and vehement opposition to and suppression of artificial intelligence.

Usage notes

  • 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.

References

  1. ^ Erik Hoel (30 June 2021) “We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI”, in The Intrinsic Perspective‎[1], Substack
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