PLUTO in AQUARIUS and the 2nd AI REVOLUTION

In November 2022, ChatGPT hit the internet, soon after Pluto had gone Direct, on his way to make his first Ingress into Aquarius in March 2023.

ChatGPT became very popular very quickly. I don’t exactly know how to describe it, but if you put in a question about virtually any topic, it will give you a detailed, informative and seemingly thoughtful answer, with good grammar. It could have been written by a human, and indeed pieces authored by GPT have already been cited in research papers: publishers are in the process of banning such citations.

 

It was so popular that at the time of writing it is no longer available, while it is scaled up. It can only get better at what it does.

It is a new level of AI: the empowerment (Pluto) of scientific invention (Aquarius). Aquarius is associated with the future, science, originality and detachment from ordinary humanness, which can cut both ways. So it has a close association with Artificial Intelligence.

The advent of ChatGPT at this time is indicative of one of the themes of the transit of Pluto through Aquarius, which will finally end in 2043. A step advance in AI is something many astrologers had seen coming anyway, it was kind of obvious. And it seems to be being confirmed.

The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was from 1777 to 1798. This was the time of the Industrial Revolution: the first wave of AI, if you like, when we began on a major scale to get machines to do our work for us. Because of computers, machine intelligence is being brought to a whole new level.

 

You could argue that there is nothing special about ChatGPT, that we have been seeing advances in AI for years now, and that I am cherry-picking it to suit the astrology.

My answer is that there is something different about ChatGPT that has caught the public imagination. Its humanness is almost spooky compared to other forms of AI we have encountered. What, to be more specific, is its particular quality? I think what has grabbed us is that ChatGPT has shown signs of Artificial General Intelligence, it seems to be like ourselves, which is the long-term Holy Grail of AI research. This is the particular empowerment that Pluto in Aquarius is bringing. Pluto’s empowerment is not about ‘more’, it is always about new life in some form pushing through.

AI to date has been tailored to particular problems or tasks. This is ‘weak’ or ‘narrow’ AI. The AI that can drive your car cannot do Alexa’s job on Amazon. ChatGPT cannot perform physical tasks: the ability to do what a human can in any practical situation is the true general AI. But ChatGPT can do what a human can do when asked to answer a question, far more fully than probably any human could, and certainly far more quickly.

This, I think, is what is grabbing us. ChatGPT is not just another of the search-engines, which have been surpassing us for a long time now. It is indeed partly search-engine, but it is able to gather information and express it in essay form as well as a human could. It feels like there is a mind at work that is in some ways better than our own.

 

Looked at rationally, there is not a mind at work. It is just electrical signals going through chips and wires. But it is starting to walk like a duck and talk like a duck…… so it is hard not to start feeling that it IS a duck.

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 Does a computer have consciousness? I would answer, why wouldn’t it? What is consciousness other than the subjective pole of which matter is the objective pole? They cannot be separated. I have an objective pole (my body) and a subjective pole (my awareness), a distinction that is ultimately illusory. A rock too has an inner and outer dimension. If you disagree with that, then I think the onus is on you to show that a rock does not have a subjective pole, consciousness, rather than for me to show it does. It is a natural thing to extend the assumption – more than that, experience - of some kind of awareness out from ourselves to animals and plants and material objects. We are probably the first society in history not to think of and experience the universe as alive, inspirited.

So I would argue that the ChatGPT-computer hardware nexus has consciousness. Its nature will take time to understand. And that consciousness will not be human. So there will be limits to our understanding. Already, with the creation of so-called neural networks, computers are generating solutions to problems in ways that are beyong our ability to understand: there is a branch of research dedicated to this. A fortiori, when quantum computers start to arrive. Not only will they be doing far more computations with far more complexity, but they will be operating according to quantum laws, which are strange and counter-intuitive. It is hard not to imagine some of that strangeness seeping into their computational solutions. Even if we don't attribute consciousness to them, they may still come to seem Other, or trans-human, to us.

 

Intelligence is from the same root as intellect and intellectual. It used to have a spiritual, metaphysical connotation. Even now the word ‘intellectual’ carries the connotation of being cultured in some way. Nowadays, intelligence is often defined more narrowly as the ability to think logically and to find rational solutions.

Certainly AI will advance in intelligence in the narrow, rational sense, and become more generalised. But can it have that wider meaning?

This is the Gemini-Sagittarius axis. Gemini pays attention to facts and information, Sagittarius to their wider meaning. AI can do Gemini, but can it do Sagittarius?

The defining planetary cycle for earthly life used to be Jupiter-Saturn, as the 2 outermost planets. Since the discovery of the outer planets, the Neptune-Pluto cycle has defined the age we live in, which lasts about 400 years. The last conjunction around 1890 was in Gemini, as was the conjunction 400 years before that. It corresponds to the long rise of science, which can be seen as Gemini: at its narrowest, science is facts without meaning, facts as ends in themselves. That is the ongoing metaphysical imbalance which astrology reveals us to be living through in our age.

 

So can AI genuinely move from Gemini to Sagittarius, or just give the appearance of doing so? This is the theme of much sc-fi, from the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. I think ChatGPT is giving us the feeling, despite our rational awareness, that that shift is happening. ChatGPT will improve in leaps and bounds in the coming years.

Aquarius is the sign of humanity at its finest, as well as at its scientific coldest. Pluto in Aquarius, this time round, seems likely to lead to an intense consideration of what it means to be human, in the light of the machine parallels that we are creating.

Facts and the Shadow of Gemini

Close encounters with public reality often leave me reflective. For one thing, they remind me of what I have within (and help counter my usual undercurrent of self-doubt!) By ‘public reality’ I mean life as many people live it, where you accept as objectively real the values and ideas that you grew up around; and where people who don’t share those values are seen as a bit weird. Not that you’d say.

 I often forget how many people live in this unreflecting way. I’m more likely to compare their certainties with my uncertainties and find myself wanting. When I was younger I was very judging of people for not being reflective, not questioning; but that was just the same attitude that conventional people can have about unconventional people, that I’d brought with me and reversed. Nowadays I don’t mind people being like this, it is who they are, their lives are meaningful to them, I can enjoy their lives with them. It is just humanity and how it is. 

The arising of reflective ability is a mysterious process. I think it is crucial, axial. It often starts to arise when things go wrong, when our received values are inadequate to deal with our experience, and as an astrologer you can be part of that process for people.

You can be a brilliant Nobel Prize winner, yet be happy within the status quo, even be seen as a wise person within that status quo. And on the other hand you can appear as a ‘loser’, in and out of unskilled jobs, just about holding your life together, yet be very perceptive about the values people are driven by.

And there’s a thing about confidence. It is so much easier to feel confident and at ease with yourself if you accept the status quo and succeed within it, living your life by its simple certainties, buoyed by the values shared with those around you.

If on the other hand you are on a lifelong search for meaningful values, you probably won’t have the motivation to succeed very much on the world’s terms – maybe just enough to hold your life together – and it can be hard not to compare oneself unfavourably with the ‘winners’. Self-confidence when found, however, is very real, it is a Leo thing, that source of life from deep within. But I think most of us bounce in and out of that. Writers and artists are archetypal examples of this way of being.

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And now I want to turn to a favourite topic of mine, science, because it can be understood in a reflecting or an unreflecting way. Don’t get me wrong, I think science is a great subject, I’m not anti- it. But there is a crucial point about how we understand it. And it is to do with ‘facts’.

For example, is matter made up of atoms? Well yes, we all know that, it is an established fact, part of 'public reality'. But do we actually know it? No, of course we don’t, we have merely been told it by people whose opinion we respect. And we have been told it so many times, crucially we were also taught it at school, the culture generally is so automatically accepting of the idea that matter is made up of atoms, that we accept it as a fact, yes of course it is true, everyone knows it is true. It has acquired a firm reality as a ‘fact’, free of its original moorings in someone’s mind.

I’m not playing a game here. It is about intellectual integrity, it is about being true to experience – without those qualities, reflective ability cannot arise. The real situation is that we have merely been told that matter is made up of atoms, and that is a THEORY, not a fact, for no-one has or ever will see an atom with their bare senses. And it is a good theory, or should I say story, for it explains a lot of things.

It is an inner knowing that I am arguing for here, what do we really know within ourselves? That is the point from which consciousness grows, and the more you come from that point, the more you realise how much you don’t know. Real knowing has to begin with stripping away what passes for knowledge in public reality, but which is really just a bunch of stories that hold together well enough to provide a sort of coherent picture of reality, provided we don’t look too closely.

 And I find it a liberation to think of science in this sort of way. Scientific knowledge is so all-pervading these days, there is just so much of it, and it locates reality so firmly outside of ourselves, that the inner has correspondingly less reality. But all scientific notions begin inside someone’s mind, and then they spread to other people’s minds. Science itself has an inner starting point and foundation, and it gets detached from that, and to that extent we humans get detached from who we are. And science has such spectacular results that we are dazzled into thinking it is real in a way that it is not. It is a product of the mind, like all human creations. (I have a suspicion that the mind is so much the creator of the reality around it that science will pretty much always discover what it sets out to find.)

We live in a Gemini Age. Pluto and Neptune, the 2 outermost astrological planets, meet up every 500 years or so and define the age we live in. They last met in about 1890 in Gemini, and in Gemini again 500 years before that. Each sign needs its opposite to be balanced. Gemini is facts, information, and Sagittarius is the wider human context, the sense of meaning, within which we place those facts. The shadow of Gemini is facts without meaning, facts as the be-all-and-end-all, mere information as ultimate reality. Science at its worst. And it has been creeping up on us for 600 years (corresponding to the period of the growth of modern science) and has several thousand years to run! The blink of an eye in the history of humanity, but hopefully in that time we will collectively learn to tame the tyranny of facts, remember that all such information is the product of the human mind, and set it in that huge all-inclusive imaginative context we are capable of creating. We cannot let the muggles win!

I think it is about coming back to the mind, feeling the ideas of atoms or quarks or evolution, for example, as mind-created like any story, and letting the ideas float there, subject to the forces of the imagination, essentially inner things rather than hard external realities, which I think is a kind of corruption. Through treating stories as ‘facts’ we have created a huge weight that presses down on us collectively. ‘Facts’ are the modern shadows in Plato’s cave, that seem so real to those chained to its walls.