AI and Astrology

I have been thinking a lot lately about artificial intelligence and astrology, because the more I look at the astrology of this particular moment in history, the more I think AI makes almost comically good sense. Obviously, ancient astrologers were not sitting around predicting ChatGPT. They weren’t writing about large language models or robots taking your order at Wendy’s. But astrology has been talking for thousands of years about intelligence, communication, invention, collective knowledge, illusion, power and enormous periods of social change. And when you put those archetypes together, AI fits into them almost too neatly. If I had to reduce the astrology of artificial intelligence to one sentence, I would say this: AI is Mercury and Uranus meeting Aquarius, while Pluto and Neptune decide what the hell we’re going to do with it.

Mercury is the easy one. Mercury rules language, writing, communication, information, calculation, classification, translation and the exchange of ideas. In other words, Mercury rules an awful lot of what AI actually does. But Mercury is also the trickster, and I think that’s important. Mercury doesn’t necessarily care whether information is profound, trivial, true, false, useful or complete nonsense. Mercury moves information. It connects things. It translates things. It imitates. It persuades. It can be brilliant and it can bullshit you with tremendous confidence. If you’ve ever watched an AI completely invent an answer and present it like it came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets, congratulations: you have met the shadow side of Mercury.

Uranus is where it starts feeling much more like the technological revolution we’re actually living through. Uranus is invention, electricity, radical change, disruption and breakthroughs that make the old way of doing something suddenly look ridiculous. Uranus is the planet that walks into the room and says, “You know that thing everybody assumed would always work this way? It doesn’t have to.” That’s AI right now. Every few months there seems to be another moment where something that sounded impossible five years ago is suddenly sitting on somebody’s phone. Uranus also tends to produce the exact emotional response we’re having to artificial intelligence: Holy shit, this is amazing, followed approximately fourteen seconds later by Holy shit, this could be terrible. Uranus liberates possibilities. It does not promise that humans will use those possibilities wisely.

Then there is Aquarius, and this may be the part I find most interesting. Aquarius is associated with networks, systems, humanity as a collective and knowledge that exists beyond one individual person. And what is a large language model, really? It is this enormous weird distillation of human language and human ideas, pulled from more information than any individual person could ever read in a lifetime. It’s a strangely literal version of the Aquarian collective mind. At its best, Aquarius says knowledge should not belong only to kings, priests, universities, wealthy people or corporations. Knowledge should move outward. Everybody should get access. That’s the beautiful possibility of AI that I think gets lost when we’re only talking about job losses and Terminator scenarios. A kid in a tiny town can have access to a tutor. A one-person business can suddenly do things that once required a staff of twenty. Someone who can’t code can build something. Someone who doesn’t have money for a consultant can at least begin figuring out what questions they need to ask. That’s extraordinarily Aquarian. But Aquarius has a shadow too. The individual can disappear inside the system. And that brings us directly to Pluto.

Pluto is now in Aquarius, and that’s where this stops looking like merely a cool technological trend and starts looking like one of the defining questions of our era. Pluto deals with power, control, obsession, destruction, transformation and the things buried underneath society that eventually have to come to the surface. Pluto doesn’t just ask, “What can this technology do?” Pluto asks, “Who owns it?” Who owns the information? Who controls the systems? Who becomes staggeringly wealthy because of them? Who loses power? Who gains it? Who gets watched? Who gets replaced? What happens when a handful of companies can process more human behavior and human language than any government or institution in history? Pluto in Aquarius is not simply technology getting better. It’s humanity renegotiating power in a world built around networks, data and collective systems.

And then we get to the astrology happening right now, which is where things get really wild. Uranus is in Gemini, Neptune is in Aries and Pluto is in Aquarius. Uranus in Gemini may be one of the most obvious astrological signatures for the AI explosion that I can imagine. Gemini is ruled by Mercury. It is language, communication, media, learning and information. Uranus revolutionizes whatever it touches. Put Uranus in Gemini and we are talking about a revolution in how people communicate with information itself. For most of computer history, humans had to learn how to speak to machines. We learned commands, menus, programming languages, search syntax and interfaces. Now something fundamental is reversing: the machine is learning how to speak to us. Increasingly you don’t have to learn the computer’s language. You can simply say what you want. That is so Uranus in Gemini it practically has a neon sign attached to it.

Neptune in Aries may turn out to be just as important. Neptune rules imagination, images, dreams, fantasy, illusion and the dissolution of boundaries. We are already watching the boundary between real and generated material dissolve. A photograph used to mean something happened. A recording meant somebody said something. Video was evidence. That assumption is dying very quickly. AI can make people who don’t exist, places that were never photographed, conversations that never occurred and increasingly convincing video of events that never happened. That’s Neptune all over the place: the image becomes untethered from reality. But Neptune is now in Aries, and Aries acts. That’s the part I would watch very closely. We’re already moving from AI that answers questions toward AI that takes action. Instead of “Here’s how to do this,” we increasingly get “I did it.” Book this. Build this. Search this. Contact these people. Analyze this pile of information and decide what comes next. Neptune in Aries makes me wonder whether one of the defining changes of the next several years will be the shift from artificial intelligence as something we consult to artificial intelligence as something we delegate to.

And the next couple of years are particularly interesting because these huge outer planets aren’t simply sitting in those signs independently. They’re working together. Uranus in Gemini forms a series of trines to Pluto in Aquarius between July 2026 and May 2028, including exact contacts again on November 29, 2026, June 15, 2027, January 13, 2028 and May 9, 2028. Uranus also sextiles Neptune through June 2027, while Neptune and Pluto continue making sextiles periodically into the early 2030s. In astrology, that’s a very different story from three giant planets fighting one another. These are flowing aspects. Change can feed change. Technological disruption can feed transformations in power. Imagination can feed technological development. New systems can arise astonishingly quickly because one revolution opens the door for another one.

That makes 2027 especially interesting to me. Uranus is in Gemini all year, Neptune remains in Aries and Pluto stays in Aquarius, and in June the Uranus-Neptune sextile, Uranus-Pluto trine and Neptune-Pluto sextile all become extremely tight again. If I were looking at that astrologically rather than trying to predict specific inventions, I would expect acceleration. Not necessarily one magical robot appearing on June 15, obviously, but a period where several technologies that have been developing separately suddenly start fitting together. AI plus robotics. AI plus medicine. AI plus education. AI plus communications. AI plus government. AI plus entertainment. The larger story may not be “AI gets smarter.” It may be that AI starts disappearing into everything else until talking about “using AI” sounds as weird as talking about “using electricity.”

Then 2028 starts introducing a different flavor. Saturn moves into Taurus in April while Pluto remains in Aquarius, and Saturn and Pluto square one another later that year. That strikes me as a possible reality-check phase. Taurus is money, material resources, physical security and things that have actual tangible value. Saturn wants rules, structures, boundaries and consequences. Pluto in Aquarius is transforming technological and collective power. That could correspond symbolically with some very practical questions finally becoming unavoidable: Who pays for all this computing power? How much electricity does it take? What happens to jobs? What is human creative work worth? Who owns AI-generated material? What gets regulated? What can’t be regulated anymore? Who is liable when an autonomous system screws something up? The technology may continue racing forward while governments, economies and ordinary people start saying, Okay, but now we have to build an actual society around this thing.

And that’s ultimately why I don’t think astrology gives us a simple “AI is good” or “AI is bad” answer. Astrology almost never works that way anyway. Uranus can liberate and destabilize. Neptune can inspire and deceive. Pluto can transform and dominate. Mercury can enlighten you and lie straight to your face. Aquarius can democratize knowledge and create systems so enormous that individual humans begin to feel irrelevant inside them. Every one of those possibilities is sitting there at the same time. The question isn’t whether these planetary energies are good or bad. It’s what we make out of them.

I think we are living through one of those rare periods where a technological change may eventually alter our idea of being human, not merely our idea of using a computer. For a very long time, intelligence itself was one of the things we used to draw a bright line around humanity. Humans think. Humans make art. Humans write. Humans reason. Humans invent. Humans communicate through complicated language. We are now creating things that can do at least convincing versions of all of those things, and we’re doing it while Pluto moves through the sign of collective humanity, Uranus revolutionizes the sign of language and Neptune dissolves the boundary between imagination and reality.

You couldn’t really ask astrology for a more appropriate sky.

And maybe the biggest question of the Pluto-in-Aquarius era isn’t going to be whether machines become human.

It may be whether living beside intelligent machines forces us to finally decide what being human actually means.