I always appreciated the concept of the Butlerian Jihad. What I underestimated was the absolute fervor I would feel for it. It's a burning yearning feeling. Deep in my soul.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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To me, it's like GMOs.
I trust the science behind GMOs. They work, and we can do amazing things with that technology.
I don't trust the profit seeking corporations that are selling the stuff to me. Doesn't matter what the technology is, Monsanto is gonna do Monstanto shit.
Makes it even more frustrating when you hear the anti-GMO people talk about why they're against it. Always completely irrational.
Honestly same.
I always got excited about early AI use because it was actually innovative.
Like using AI to get better HDR photos, using AI for object recognition and Augmented Reality.
I was sure I'd always be an early adopter for it all.
Then within a day of ChatGPTs release, I saw the same social patterns as NFTs forming. I was like "this stupid chat bot fad will die out quickly, it's all slop frontends for the same chat bot".
I even made a point to differentiate LLMs from AI, because AI used to label something innovative.
And now I'm here vehemently avoiding LLMs. Cringing whenever I hear AI tacked on to a product name. Getting suspicious whenever I hear the word.
If only real life AI was anything close to sci-fi AI. We expected cold, calculating computer psychopaths and we got overly enthusiastic yes men that get in a ditz if you ask it about non-existent emojis
The Dune books had the "Butlerian jihad" where humanity banned all thinking machines. As a kid I was like "who would ever ban cool shit like that?" Now I'm all "where the fuck is this Butler dude?"
I keep thinking about the first ep of Battlestar Galactica (2004) where everything in the ship is hard wired and closed-circuit and realizing that that's more like what my personal sci-fi future is going to look like.
Nah, it’s not intelligent.
Everything we have today wouldn’t be considered AI in science fiction.
Yeah this is where I'm at. Actual movie level AI would be neat, but what we have right now is closer to a McDonald's toy pretending to be AI than the real deal.
I'd be overjoyed if we had decently functional AI that could be trusted to do the kind of jobs humans don't want to do, but instead we have hyped up autocomplete that's too stupid to reliably trust to run anything (see the shitshow of openclaw when they do).
There are places where machine learning has and will continue to push real progress but this whole "AI is on the road to AGI and then we'll never work again" bullshit is so destructive.
What we have now is "neat." It's freaking amazing it can do what it does. However it is not the AI from science fiction.
I think this is what causes this divide between the AI lovers and haters. What we have now is genuinely impressive even if largely nonfunctional. Its a confusing juxtaposition
Folks don't seem to realize what LLMs are, if they did then they wouldn't be wasting trillions trying to stuff them in everything.
Like, yes, it is a minor technological miracle that we can build these massively-multidimensional maps of human language use and use them to chart human-like vectors through language space that remain coherent for tens of thousands of tokens, but there's no way you can chain these stochastic parrots together to get around the fact that a computer cannot be held responsible, algorithms have no agency no matter how much you call them "agents", and the people who let chatbots make decisions must ultimately be culpable for them.
It's not "AI", it's a n-th dimensional globe and the ruler we use to draw lines on that globe. Like all globes, it is at best a useful fiction representing a limited perspective on a much wider world.
Like, yes, it is a minor technological miracle that we can build these massively-multidimensional maps of human language use and use them to chart human-like vectors through language space
Yeah. Like thats objectively a very interesting technological innovation. The issue is just how much its been overhyped.
The hype around AI would be warranted if it were, like, at the same level as the hype around the Rust programming language or something. Which is to say: it’s an useful innovation in certain limited domains which is worth studying and is probably really fascinating to some nerds. If we could have left the hype at that level then we would have been fine.
But then a bunch of CEOs and tech influencers started telling us that these things are going to cure cancer or aging and replace all white collar jobs by next year. Like okay buddy. Be realistic. This overhype turned something that was genuinely cool into this magical fantasy technology that doesn't exist.
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Absolutely. Today's "AI" is as close to real AI as the shitty "hoverboard" we got a few years back is to the one from BttF. It's marketing bullshit. But that's not what bothers me.
What bothers me is that if we ever do develop machine persons, I have every reason to believe they will be treated as disposable property, abused, and misused, and all before they reach the public. If we're destroyed by a machine uprising, I have no doubt we will have earned it many times over.
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Or in my definition. But hey what do IT experts know, right?
Yeah, intelligence is a continuum. Animals have varying degrees of intelligence (esp. corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, other "c" animals...), but that isn't the same as saying they have human-level intelligence. AGI and ASI are the important thresholds.
Human intelligence is a spectrum. I would say that current LLMs are at about the 20th percentile on that spectrum.
That says more about my opinions on human intelligence than LLM...
Wouldn’t that require the LLM to actually grasp ideas?
Even brain dead people can understand some things
Define "grasp ideas".
They are beginning to be able to correlate images, sounds, text (in multiple languages). If we fitted them with other sensors (chemical receptors, accelerometers, etc) and feed them sufficient training data, they would be able to correlate those as well. I would call this correlative ability the "grasping of ideas".
Where they fail is abstraction. But, this is a failing of human intelligence as well. Some fully productive humans never develop more than a rudimentary capacity for abstraction, arguably less than LLMs have demonstrated.
Don't get me wrong: They're at toddler-levels of actual intelligence and only simulate greater capacity by regurgitating what they've learned people like to hear. But, a hell of a lot of people are guilty of the same damn thing.
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Detroit: Become Human was actually an attempted insurrection secretly orchestrated by Cyberlife
If the Androids win, then they get voting rights then Cyberlife use their backdoor to control them and then easily win elections by keep making more Androids and have them vote for their candidate.
Now that's unrealistic, why do all of that when you can just win the contract for the electronic voting counters?
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I thought we'd at least get cool shit like Metal Fears or maybe a mister handy but nooooo we hafta get some slop tastic creepy looking shit. Stop making robots look vaguely human, make them look like cats I like cats far more than people and may feel bad about throwing one into a river if it looks like a cat.
And in cat form the vague condescension would be fitting
We have ai that isn't intelligent, hoverboards that have wheels, and other examples that I've forgotten that would really help me make my point.
Corporations have observed popular science fiction and have turned these ideas into marketing slogans.
other examples that I've forgotten that would really help me make my point.
Self driving cars that gleefully run down model children in school pick up simulations.
All you anti-AI luddites can bite my shiny metal Cybertruck bumper. I am saving SO MUCH TIME by having my vehicle hit schoolchildren on my behalf, I can finally work on engineering the perfect prompt to generate images of the kids all black Antifa uniforms, so people can tell that they were asking for it by how they were dressed.. Modern problems, modern solutions! Now, if only I could get Grok to stop making the kids' outfits so sexy...
(Cosmically massive amounts of sarcasm, which feels unnecessary to point out, but I've been wrong before)
On the one hand, I can tell the sarcasm. On the other hand, I've seen worse go woosh.
The worst part is that it's not really AI
It's LLMs and it can NEVER be AGI. Fundamentally it cant
Bro it totally can, we just need another billion Nvidia chips running on a megaserver farm, eating up twice the total energetic output of the sun bro. It's easy bro, don't be such a downer bro
It can if you have a different definition of AGI. EZ
I am not rejecting them for being robots or AI, but because they are truly shitty garbage right now and nowhere near what I would actually like to see.
I want Data, not the ED-209.
If it is not from eccentric (or mad) scientists passion project but capitalism hellscape my approval rate stays low.
Even for a sci fi l read where owning their own computer was illegal (and the protag labeled as terrorist trying to do so) it was government authoritarian stuff, not artificial scarcity and push to subscription or government-megacorp corruption :(
That's right, if it's not Noonien Soong's creation, I don't want any part of it.
usually the AI and robots depicted in science fiction isn't, um...paralyzingly stupid. they might be evil, but they wouldn't tell someone to walk to the car wash to wash their car
edit: somewhat related, i highly recommend Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove. one main character is AI that i was full-on rooting for more and more throughout the book
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If they were owned collectively so everyone could benefit it would be a lot easier to swallow. If it meant people could retire in comfort and not be destitute without a job that would help, too.
But a wrong answer machine that enriches assholes and convinces them they don’t need humans is not cool.
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Well, it’s not AI. It’s theft of your digital data and unblinking surveillance. No reason not to be against that
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Well it depends if you and the AI robots are on the same side or not.
It's like legalizing weed but making sure only wealthy cartels get to own them.
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I always thought cybernetics would be cool. I forgot they'd come from companies like HP that have a subscription service for them and if you don't pay it they take it back.
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It's having grown up on sci-fi that has allowed me to see that LLMs are not "AI", so there's no surprise I'm against "imitation AI".
Maybe, when we get actual artificial intelligence, and not this glorified auto-correct, we'll be more on board?
i dont hate them im just disappointed
You shouldn't just reject things on a visceral level. Thankfully with AI you don't have to as there so many actual reasons why it's a bad idea.
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Same, I guess. But then I also didn't really expect the "AI" to be a bunch of overhyped nonsense snake oil bullshit, with tremendous practical and ethical problems... so I've got to say I feel pretty comfy with the stance.
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