News
Interactive Shake-up
by Jane Lewis
In July this year Uranus moved into Gemini. The three outer planets are now all in the first degrees of their signs and link together in a harmonious triad with Uranus in Gemini trine Pluto in Aquarius and both sextile to Neptune in Aries. In the coming years we can expect to see a huge shake-up in the way we relate with each other and conduct business in our everyday lives in the office, at school and in our local environment. It’s not hard to guess that this seismic change is coming through AI.
The last time Uranus was in Gemini the world experienced perhaps the biggest shock it had ever known with the explosion of the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Uranus has an explosive effect that can send shock-waves far and wide. While the spectre of nuclear war is again looming as a threat, the current harmonious aspects between the outer planets offer a sign of hope that it won’t happen again, and instead gives promise of something equally momentous but less malevolent that will propel us forwards and upwards in a positive way. Neptune at the midpoint between Uranus and Pluto helps to mediate their energies and direct them into pioneering changes and new discoveries that put sympathy and compassion for others at the centre of things. If we’ve learned anything since learning to split the atom, it’s surely the need to apply science for the benefit of everybody and all life instead of existing in an ethical vacuum.
We know that nothing is simply black and white but there are infinite shades of grey in between so we have to accept that AI will bring as many threats as promises, and that we’ll inevitably experience a mixture of both. Every cloud has a silver lining, even a mushroom one, for all its ghastliness. On that fateful day of 6th August 1945 when the atom bomb exploded at Hiroshima, Mars was applying to conjoin Uranus on the event chart midheaven, with Uranus itself making an exact square to a Virgo ascendant.
Although we tend to think of AI as something very modern, it actually has quite a long history. Ancient myths and legends tell of artificial beings with intelligence, and in more recent centuries there are many examples including Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinwho put the idea back into human consciousness. She has four planets in scientifically-minded Virgo in her 4th house with a triple conjunction of Sun, Mars and Uranus with Mercury in a later degree of the sign.
Other key milestones in AI’s development include Alan Turing’s ground-breaking work on theoretical machine intelligence which he began in the early 1940s at the time of the last Uranus Gemini ingress. Uranus is very prominent in his chart in Aquarius on his midheaven square Gemini rising.
In the 1950s Isaac Asimov’s short stories I Robot imagined a future of artificial intelligence. Born 8 years after Turing, Uranus in Asimov’s chart had reached the last degree of Aquarius. It’s clear that Uranus is very comfortable in air signs where it can easily express itself through futuristic inventions of the human mind. By the end of Uranus’ current transit through Gemini in 2032 I wonder how very different our interaction with each other and the world around us will be. Very.