IMHO Frank Herbert’s prediction in Dune is more apt.
Humanity stagnated due to its dependency on thinking machines, almost to humanities demise leading to the Butlerian Jihad and the Great Convention: thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.
That’s what we’re facing today: societal cognitive stagnation from outsourcing our reasoning to auto-correct.
If you pay close enough attention on your surroundings you still almost always can find people smarter than yourself in all fields. I doubt AI changed that, besides social isolation. But that was already a problem before.
The change that “AI” is causing is that people that would have consulted experts now consult an automatic text generator.
This goes for social media feed algorithms and any artificial curation too.
Society doesn’t collapse because your aunt uses Facebook or autocorrect. It collapses because CxO’s and politicians use LLM’s trained on The Economist.
I’ve been thinking about this quote from God Emperor of Dune a lot lately:
“What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking - there’s the real danger.”
Bless the Maker and his water.
Uh… Warhammer includes a lot of ideological tendencies and many of them I would distinctly call not right lol.
But I know next to nothing so if some nerd wants to chime in what this is referencing at a deeper level than I understand, fuck me up.
I shall nerd.
Warhammer 40k includes a very long timeline, thus the name. Sometime before now and the ‘Horus Heresy’ (the event that incapacitated the emperor, 10,000 years before the current time in universe) humanity reaches a golden ages of prosperity. Reaches across the stars and sets up a thriving interstellar federation. Things are more Star Trek-y than they are Warhammer at this point. Technology is extreme and its around this time that the majority of technology existing in the universe was developed. But, artificial intelligence was one of the creations of the time and things didn’t go fantastic.
A lot of the historical records are lost, but eventually a race called the ‘Men of Gold’, an augmented subrace of humans, popped up. They created the Men of Stone (also augmented) who in turn created the Men of Iron, artificial intelligence. The Men of Iron eventually overthrew their creators and started an intergalactic war with humanity that took an alliance of multiple races to quell. After that point, artificial intelligence became outlawed and humanity fell into stagnation. When the Warp itself became more difficult (and eventually impossible) to navigate, humanity fell further into ruin. Its from that situation that the Emperor reveals himself and begins his nonsense.
the Emperor reveals himself and begins his nonsense.
Also, right after the Men of Iron were put down, all the other races that had been too scared to attack us in our prime, stabbed us in the back, causing all the xenophobia
(Minor nitpick - while we don’t know for sure about the men of gold, the men of stone were sentient robots (or at least, the one that’s still around is fully mechanical (and is posing as a servitor)))
I was under the assumption that they were augmented humans. After checking the wiki, apparently there’s so little information about them that they just say:
According to dimly remembered legends and the few scraps of actual historical record that survived the Age of Strife, the Men of Stone were an artificially-created or augmented faction or sub-species of Humanity who had been engineered by the equally legendary and poorly understood Men of Gold.
Neat. Today I learned. Basically just “Who the fuck knows”
There’s a short story titled “Ancient History” that (with a heavy dose of inference/speculation) seems to suggest the Men of Stone were humans engineered specifically to have no/a greatly reduced warp presence in order to avoid attracting demons while navigating the warp.
And (with an even heftier amount of speculation) the attributes seemingly ascribed to the Men of Stone line up suspiciously well with what’s known of the Leagues of Votann.
Were you referring to this guy?
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/UR-025
Because then i have to nitpick your nitpicking since he is a man of iron, not stone.
Ah damn you’re right, teach me to 40k while tipsy!
AFAIK AI can be corrupted by chaos. That’s probably why it went rogue and why it was banned. Well “banned”, as big ships and STC-s probably have ai in them.
It’s a grimdark setting. Everybody sucks, the Empire Of Man too.
Human AI can be, we so no such issue with the Leagues of Vortan, T’au, or Necron AIs.
Both Dune and WH40K have a history of machines rising up against the society that built them, and after a bloody war they banned thinking machines.
Dune too. But again the meme is really only referring to both universes history of humanity’s rejection of AI
The tech sucks ass, but the people currently calling the shots are much, much worse
Look, i’m not saying the Brotherhood of Steel is right in what they do, but i can totally see where they coming from, and what i see with techbros is almost making techno facist justifiable in some way.
