In Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two, AI is nowhere ... and everywhere

Artificial Intelligence is notable by it's absence in the second of Villeneuve's Dune epics. And that is important.

Source: Dune: Part Two

Between Denis Villeneuve’s first installment of his epic adaptation of Dune in 2021, and the just-released Dune: Part Two, the world changed. Back in 2021 generative AI wasn’t even a mere twinkle in most people’s eyes. Now it’s transforming the world we live in at a thousand miles an hour.

This may not seem all that relevant to Villeneuve’s duology, until you consider that Frank Herbert’s original novel is based in a future that’s been fundamentally shaped by what he calls “thinking machines” and society’s rejection of them.

Given the sea-change in AI’s influence within the real world over the past three years, I was intrigued to watch this second installment of Villeneuve’s adaptation when it hit cinemas this past week. Plus, I’d promised the editor of the law journal Jurimetrics a review article on the film, and I needed and angle!

Dune is a movie that’s pretty much devoid of computers. There are no laptops, no tablets, no internet, no convenient chatbots, and absolutely no AI. Rather, the Dune universe is obsessed with the essence of what it means to be human, and has thrown out “digital computers” and all the baggage that comes with them in favor of “human computers” — individuals exquisitely engineered, manipulated, and trained, to take on tasks that are typically relegated to machines in our world.

The result is a fictional universe where a history of AI gone wrong is captured in subtle (and easy to miss) ripples from the past.

This, not surprisingly, has already been written about extensively by others. Chase Hutchinson’s 2023 article in The Collider is a great place to start, as is Zachary Pirtle’s essay on Humans, Machines, and an Ethics for Technology in Dune in the 2022 edited collection “Dune and Philosophy: Minds, Monads, and Muad'Dib”.

But I was still interested in seeing if anything new might be gleaned from the latest creation of Villeneuve’s.

The answer is not a lot, unless you’re looking for it.

Dune: Part Two takes off where Part One ended, and follows pretty much the same style, storyline, and adherence to the book as the first film (with one or two notable exceptions). As in Part One, this is a universe where digital machines are notable by their absence, and where people live by their wits rather than by being dependent on computers.

And yet, because the presence of AI in the real world has changed so dramatically over the past three years, the backstory as to why computers are absent in Dune: Part Two is all the more relevant today than it was back in 2022.

To grasp the significance of this, we need to go back to Herbert’s original text. In a pivotal early encounter between Paul Atreides — the reluctantly messianic figure the story revolves around — and the manipulative Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim, Mohaim tells Paul:

“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.”

Paul retorts with the quote:

“ ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind”,

to which Mohaim responds:

“Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible … But what the OC should have said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind’ ”.

This exchange is missing from Villeneuve’s Dune, but the ramifications of the backstory are not. As a result, both films play out against a backdrop of a society that long ago banished thinking machines from their lives. And they reflect a future where the core – the soul, or the essence – of what it means to be human is determined by biological and psychological manipulation (aided and abetted by the psychoactive and somewhat mystical “spice” or “melange”) rather than computer augmentation.

As I explore in the Jurimetrics review I’m just finishing (and need to send to the editor as soon as I’ve completed this article!), we’re not in an age of “thinking machines” yet. But we’re getting close. And as we do, there are challenges as well as opportunities that are arising that are unique in human history — so much so that science fiction is becoming an increasingly relevant (although still deeply unreliable) source of insight.

Here, what intrigues me in Mohaim’s retort above is the fear of counterfeit human minds — not necessarily intelligent, autonomous, conscious machines, but machines that emulate human behaviors and capabilities to the extent that it becomes hard to differentiate one from the other.

When we put aside misnomers around “intelligence” and “consciousness”, this feels like where we are currently heading with AI. Not with machines that can think for themselves, but machines that give the illusion of being able to do so — and in a very human way.

There are, of course, tremendous opportunities that come with this. But it’s also worth pausing to think about the potential consequences of blurring the lines between what defines us as humans — what brings value to ourselves and those around us through our unique “human-ness” — and what we build machines to do.

In Dune, preserving the essence of what it means to be human leads to a rejection of anything that could potentially rob people of their “human-ness”. The result is a society that feels viscerally human-centric. Yet it’s also a deeply flawed society, rife with political manipulation and intrigue, and vast time-spanning schemes that leverage human weaknesses to consolidate and wield power.

Because of this, the book and its sequels provide an intriguing study in the complex tension between society and advanced technologies. This is less apparent in the films — but it’s still there when you look closely.

And because of this, Dune: Part Two, as well as it’s prequel, are worth watching — if only for what they shed insight on through what is missing.

Afterword

The Jurimetrics review I should have been completing while writing this will be out later this year — I’ll add a link when it’s published.

I also intended to start this article with a brief review of Dune: Part Two. As it turned out I had to “kill” that narrative darling to keep things focused and tight. But if you want the tl;dr, I was disappointed with the movie.

Certainly the moviemaking craft here is astonishing. As with the first film, the cinematography is stunning, and in a cinema with a top notch sound system the soundscape is breathtaking (I watched Dune: Part One in a movie theater where it wasn’t, and came out feeling that my body had been physically pummeled for three hours!).

And yet I found the story telling less than engaging — and I realize that, having typed this, I will now have to go into hiding as Dune obsessives the world over hunt me down!

Dune: Part Two follows Herbert’s original reasonably faithfully. There are plot changes that were probably necessary to keep the length of the film down. But technically the adaptation is pretty good.

It’s also somewhat superficial though.

If you know the book, you’ll be able to read the subtleties and sub plots into the cinematographic narrative. But if you aren’t, you’ll only get a skimming of the ideas Herbert explores in the novel — and you’ll most likely completely miss the complexity of Herbet’s thinking and his damning critique of political and religious power.

Word on the street has it that some of this will be resolved in Dune: Part Three — which is rumored to be released in the next 3 - 5 years or so. But that’s another beef I had with the film — it’s a prequel to what comes next as much as a sequel to what came before, and as a result it leaves the stoty hanging rather than reaching any resolution.

This would have probably gone down better with me had I realized this was the case — but there’s nothing worse than a movie that feels like it’s just getting going … and then unexpectedly stops.

In Villeneuve’s defense, there’s a strong argument to be made for films that eschew a neat hero’s journey for more realistic story telling where there are no neat beginnings and endings — and such an approach is truer to Herbert’s writing than a satisfying conclusion would have been.

But I’m still a sucker for a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

That said, Dune: Part Two isn’t a bad movie — and I’m sure that to many people it will be a rather good one.