The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune.

Is it also true that Fremen are canonically descendants of Zensunni practitioners, which is a mix of Zen and Sunni Islam

Many other restrict machines, and the dogma is encoded on a religious text called the Orange Catholic Bible. And, this might be a big jump but, some of the specific anti-machine quotes are similar to Matthew 12:31-32 IMO

> With the rise of AI came the rise of a technocratic class that created and controlled these machines, leading to oppressive structures over knowledge and the economy.

It also quotes Dune, where it is said more directly:

> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

It’s as if calling something AI is all that’s needed to justify it being the same thing as Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI.

The ultimate fact is that LLMs are a pretty powerful technology that has little to nothing to do with most fictional depictions of intelligent machines.

Sloppy thinking all the way down.

https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...