How Dune Prophecy Explores a Future Afraid of AI

The newest addition to the Dune franchise doesn’t want to be a one-off entry. According to Dune: Prophecy executive producer Jordan Goldberg, “There are so many things to touch upon in this universe — our characters themselves are incredibly rich, and their choices and their backstories and their motivations give us a lot of potential for more stories. I’m hoping we can go as long as we can. I mean, the show is called Dune: Prophecy, so we’re just getting started with how all this comes to be, 10,000 years later, with Paul Atreides.”

Says star Travis Fimmel, with a laugh, “It’s really a period piece, isn’t it?”

“It’s a futuristic period piece,” Goldberg agrees.

During a recent day of roundtable interviews with the cast and producers behind the HBO spinoff series, Dune: Prophecy’s curious place in Dune lore was a big topic of conversation — especially because of the show’s exploration of how technology works in this specific time period.

Showrunner Alison Schapker acknowledges that the Prophecy team was “definitely influenced by Denis Villeneuve’s universe — I think he really unlocked Dune for people, keeping it as an incredible spectacle, but also really grounded in the characters. So yes, we do view ourselves as 10,000 years earlier, but speaking to those films from a distance.”

And this means a whole different attitude when it comes to how technology works in this fictional universe, specifically one which contends with the aftermath of a brutal war between AI and humanity, known to Dune-heads as the Butlerian Jihad. Following that hundred-year conflict, all so-called “thinking machines” were banned from use; in Frank Herbert’s Dune — and accordingly, Villeneuve’s Dune films — such technology is considered a relic of the past, since the Butlerian Jihad took place literally thousands of years ago.

However, the characters of Prophecy, set much earlier in the timeline, have a much clearer memory of the brutal battle between AI and humanity that led to said rejection… as well as a clearer memory of how useful that now-forbidden technology can be. Cast member Chloe Lea notes that “it was quite recent that [the war between computers and humanity] happened, in relation to our characters being in the Sisterhood. So I feel like that fear of technology is probably like ingrained within us. It’s probably still quite fresh.”

Adds Fimmel, “Imagine if everybody’s phone just got taken off them today. It’d just throw the world into such a mess. You gotta think for yourself. You can’t just Google it.”

This isn’t to say that technology of any kind is off the table — Prophecy, like the rest of Dune, makes significant use of “Holtzman” repelling technology to power advances like space travel and personal body shields that protect people from most forms of attack.

“It’s a really cool device in the films and in the books, so it’s cool to have that in our world,” Goldberg says. “And what we did with it was extend it to other things. Our hovercrafts are Holtzman-generated, we have a prison where people are levitated with Holtzman belts. We’ve got wheelchairs that are Holtzman-levitated as well. It’s fun to take some of the staples, in terms of technology, and try to show how it’s spread out through our universe.”

Additionally, humanity, being a pretty adaptable species (at least in Herbert’s fictional universe), does move forward in new ways. “The interesting thing about our show is when you cut people off of technology like that, there’s a bit of stagnation,” Goldberg says. “How does humanity react to that?” Dune’s answer to that question, he continues is “all these various different schools, the Sisterhood being one of them, jump into the fray to lead what the next human evolution is.”

The Sisterhood — a female-led order devoted to guiding the future of humanity — will eventually evolve into the Bene Gesserit, a powerful collective of women with supernatural abilities acquired through rigorous training. Even in the Sisterhood’s early days, though, its members have developed the ability to detect lies, amongst other skills.

Without being able to rely on technology, cast member Jade Anouka suggests, “it means our focus is way more on like our bodies and our abilities.” Anouka plays another disciple of the Sisterhood, and describes the training that she and her fellow acolytes receive as a way to unlock “the abilities that we have within ourselves that are so powerful — actually focusing, looking inwards and going, okay, we can teach you to learn to control your body on a molecular level, and actually be able to read people.”

Prior to Prophecy, Schapker had been an executive producer on HBO’s Westworld, which also did “its own spinning-its-own-tail about artificial intelligence. So I was very tapped into the current debates and keeping my eye on it.”

Going from working on Westworld and its deeply embedded concerns about the evolution of AI, she says, “into a world on the other side of our conflict with artificial intelligence — and to actually be dealing with the fallout and ramifications and fear and suspicion from the banning of machines, and also to know what’s in between that in the Dune universe, a real great cost to humanity in giving up their agency like that… It’s trippy and it’s wonderful.”

Schapker noted that the recently revived interest in Dune “couldn’t be happening at a better moment, because here we are, rushing headlong into turning our thinking over to machines, for better or worse. It’s a pertinent time to be asking questions, and I think Dune is asking a whole series of questions about where that might lead.”

Star Jodhi May agrees. “It’s not necessarily new, but the way it chimes in with what we’re going through now and what it means for us on a sort of day-to-day [level] is really prescient. [Herbert] was really ahead of his time in what he was talking about — the dangers of what it means to invest in the synthetic or the mechanical. To the extent that we divest ourselves of authority and self-determination.”

Dune: Prophecy premieres Sunday, November 17th, on HBO and Max. Sign up for a Max subscription here.