Before Denis Villeneuve brought the world of Dune to the big screen, before Frank Herbert wrote his famous book, there was another book called Erewhon, written by Samuel Butler in 1872. The Butlerian Jihad, a crusade led by free humans against thinking machines in the world of Dune, owes its name to him.Here is what Samuel writes in his essay published a little before the book: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.He was referring to the impact of industrialization on Victorian society, but I think it’s hard to find more fitting words for what’s happening around us today:How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?But that book is widely known, you only have to check the list of pop-culture references on its Wikipedia page to see just how widely. I want to draw your attention to other people and other quotes, from a different era and a different country.The bourgeois press has widely publicized a new science—cybernetics. This fashionable pseudotheory, put forward by a small group of American “scientists,” claims to solve all the central problems of science and save humanity from all social calamities. The cybernetics craze has spread into various fields of knowledge: physiology, psychology, sociology, psychiatry, linguistics, and others. According to the cyberneticists, the impetus for the creation of their pseudoscience was the resemblance between the human brain and complex modern machines.— M. Yaroshevsky, “Cybernetics—the ‘Science’ of Obscurantists.” Literary Gazette, 5 April 1952 But nothing offered a solution to the main problem: the metal monsters remained nothing more than machines requiring human control. And that was when a new “science” emerged, so-called “cybernetics.” If it is impossible to realize the “dream” in practice, could it not at least be made to serve the purposes of propaganda? If it is impossible to give a robot the qualities of the human mind, could people themselves not be convinced that they can be replaced by robots? In the United States, there is now a whole range of the most “precise” definitions of the meaning and aims of the notorious field of cybernetics. In essence, however, their purpose has always been—and remains—to conceal the failures of the creators of “thinking” machines, pass off wishful thinking as reality, and exploit the actual achievements of modern technology for the most unbridled and mendacious imperialist propaganda. — K. Gladkov, engineer and Stalin Prize laureate, “Cybernetics, or Longing for Mechanical Soldiers.” Technology for the Youth, August 1952.Of course, we should take these quotes with a grain of salt, given the anti-Americanism that was so widespread in the USSR back then, but it’s still fascinating how well they fit the current AI bubble we’re living in—and how the main players are once again, surprise, coming from the US.I have no doubt the future will bring more quotes like these, and many others, but what fascinates me is that, amid all these breakthroughs by machines (in science, programming, society, you name it), the most compelling stories still revolve around the most human traits of all: greed, ambition, vanity, and the fear of being left behind.Looking at you, Navier–Stokes drama.