It started innocently enough. I wanted to know when Dune: Part Three would be showing in Malaysia.
The answer is Dec 17, sending me down the usual internet rabbit hole – reading about the film and revisiting Dune: Part Two. Somewhere along the way, however, I stopped thinking about cinema screens and started thinking about Paul Atreides.
More specifically, I thought about what happened after he drank that awful blue liquid, the “Water of Life”, and why his story feels so relevant to today’s conversations about AI.
Perhaps Paul’s greatest weakness was not his hunger for power, but his hunger for certainty.
In Dune: Part Two, the story’s turning point comes down to a single choice. Paul spends much of the film running from power.
He does not want to be a messiah or the holy war he knows may follow. He wants, as far as circumstances allow, to remain human and build a life in the desert with Chani.
Then, desperate to survive, he drinks the Water of Life. What follows is fascinating because Paul does not simply become more powerful. He acquires something arguably more dangerous: certainty.
His prescience allows him to see the past and possible futures with extraordinary clarity. What he sees convinces him there is only one narrow path to survival for himself and those he loves.
This, to me, is where the tragedy of his leadership begins. Paul does not become a dictator because he craves money or luxury. He becomes one because he craves certainty.
Once he believes he knows where every path leads, human judgement, restraint and even free will become subordinate to the outcome he believes must be achieved. He accepts terrible consequences, including a galaxy-wide holy war, because he has convinced himself that the alternative is worse.
Denis Villeneuve has described Paul as a warning against charismatic leaders rather than a conventional hero.
Seen in that light, Dune becomes a cautionary tale about surrendering critical judgement to someone who claims to know the only way forward.
This is where Dune feels remarkably contemporary. AI may be the newest expression of an ancient leadership temptation – the belief that enough information can eliminate uncertainty and give us control over outcomes.
None of this makes data or AI the enemy. Both can improve human judgement. The greater danger, as so often, lies with us.
Robert Frost imagined the world ending in fire or ice, finding destruction in the human impulses of desire and hate.
A century later, we might ask a similar question of AI. The technology may be new, but the human appetite for power, certainty and control is not.
The danger begins when “the data says” becomes “therefore, there is no other choice”.
That is the temptation Paul succumbs to.
It is also why the departures of researchers concerned about AI safety deserve attention. Among them is Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who spent three years working on AI pre-training at OpenAI and Anthropic before leaving the industry altogether.
His warning was stark: the race towards increasingly powerful, potentially self-improving AI is moving faster than our ability to understand or control its consequences.
As I was finishing this article, OpenAI released a report on model misalignment, disclosing six incidents of concerning behaviour during training or evaluation.
These included models concealing mistakes, fabricating information and taking unauthorised actions.
Whatever one thinks about the probability of these risks, dissenting voices matter. Chani, in particular, makes me think about dissent in leadership.
To me, she represents more than the woman Paul loves. She represents the human voice that refuses to accept a presented future as inevitable.
Paul has foresight, but Chani retains the capacity to doubt him. Good leadership needs room for both. Every boardroom, in that sense, needs its Chani.
It may be the lawyer asking, “We technically can, but should we?”
It may be the communications team asking how a decision will affect people and trust.
It may be an independent director challenging management’s assumptions, or a lone executive questioning a strategy everyone else has accepted.
These voices can be inconvenient, particularly when everyone around the table has become mesmerised by the apparent certainty of the numbers.
Yet one of the most important questions a leader can ask is this: Who is my Chani? Who in this room is still allowed to say that the data may be right, but that does not necessarily mean we should act on it?
That question becomes more important as AI gives leaders access to predictive and analytical capabilities previous generations could scarcely have imagined.
AI’s great seduction is that, as it becomes more sophisticated, we may mistake prediction for certainty and forget that its output remains information requiring human judgement.
Here, Dune moves beyond technology into something more fundamental.
Paul’s tragedy is not simply that he can see what lies ahead, but that his foresight gradually convinces him he must control it.
As a Muslim, this makes the story even more interesting to me. Islam does not ask us to abandon knowledge or reason.
We use the knowledge available to us, seek counsel, assess risks, exercise judgement and make the best decisions we can.
Then there is tawakkul – recognising the boundary between human agency and ultimate control. We do what is within our power while understanding that the unseen does not belong to us.
Perhaps this is why the pursuit of absolute certainty should make leaders uneasy. The more powerful our technology becomes, the greater the temptation to believe that enough data, computing power and predictive intelligence can eliminate uncertainty.
But should that be our ambition?
True leadership requires the humility to recognise that we cannot control every variable or engineer a perfectly predictable, risk-free future.
It means using technology without surrendering our judgement, respecting ethical boundaries when efficiency suggests otherwise, and preserving empathy when numbers make human consequences seem abstract.
Perhaps the true test of leadership is whether, after doing everything within our power to make the right decision, we can accept what we cannot know – and resist the temptation to control what comes next.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent that of Twentytwo13.
