Hello my name is Assia and I’m an Aquarius.
This is however not a call for help, it’s a shout-out from excitement.
I don’t know much about Astrology but I have heard that Pluto, the planet of transformation and change, will exit the Capricorn constellation after 16 disruptive years (financial crisis, Arab Spring, Trump, wars, Covid) and now on Sunday 21st January enter Aquarius. The sun will also move from Pisces into Aquarius during the March equinox to kick off the mythical and free-spirited Age of Aquarius. Why is this at all important in the context of AI and society? In short, because Aquarius is the humanitarian, curious, idealist, eclectic and a bit mad star sign with a strong influence and passion for science and technology. Even stronger is its passion for humanity and the greater good.
The stars say that the next 20 years will be a momentous time for technology and science progress but more aligned with society and humanity. It’s a time for a shift in human consciousness and social paradigm shifts in parallel with technological discoveries. Whether you believe in astrology or not, it is simply worthwhile to believe in this as a common future for ourselves so we can do everything in our individual and collective power to achieve it. The hope for a new positive chapter in humanity is indeed exciting.
The Aquarius inside me is still agitated and fighting to resolve a paradox that has preoccupied me for the last 15 years - maybe it’s my Capricorn ascendent causing this disturbance!. Although I have enjoyed my work in technology over the last two decades, I have never truly surrendered to it with absolute wonder and admiration for new gadgets and innovations. I always felt torn between technology and the human, between the innovation hype and the human impact, between the lack of meaning when using certain technology and our eternal search for meaning as humans. I’ve often reflected on the future of tech and humans as a zero-sum game. Humans spike (or hijack) technological progress by developing tech for evil things and technology threatens humanity by the risk of self-determination and making us irrelevant. How can we even co-exist? Am I betraying our human evolution and agency by working on non-earth shattering IT projects and sitting bent over a screen for 10 hours a day?
Ugh fear, fatalism, disappointment and giving up.
The subtle effect of circling in negative thoughts - ah yes this will happen, this will/is a problem, oh look people are bad, oh well what can you do - is that we absolve ourselves of the agency to change things. We lift up hands in an outraged (and ever so slightly gleeful) surrender, as if to say “I know it will be bad, but I can’t do anything about it. It’s the others that are the problem” (such a mindset is of course easily transferrable to many other systems requiring change such as climate, politics, education etc).
I admit to taking shameful delight in catastrophising. It gives me a sense of power (that I think I know) and powerlessness (I don’t need to act).
The What-ifs
We often think subconsciously in “what-if” scenarios, presenting rhetorical questions that have a strong emotional impact.
What if robots take our jobs?
What if humans are inherently evil?
What if the world boils over?
What if our kids have to fight the neighbour for food?
All valid existential questions, but these are fear questions generally triggering a freeze (or flight) response in our nervous system. It’s too much for us to cope and we shut down, we close our eyes, we close our ears. But the fear, suspicion and a sense of disempowerment remains. Imagine how all of us combined with this energetic resonance can spiral into a self fulfilling prophecy when we can smugly say (if we are still alive) “see, I knew it”.
What if we look at the “what-if” scenario in a different way?
What if the robots only support us in our jobs but we are still the main agents?
What if humans are inherently good and are conditioned to act in machiavellian self interest through a permissive system that we should aim to change?
What if the world doesn’t boil over and we find a collaborative solution to climate change?
Reframing the scenario game has an immediate effect on our nervous system. Do you also feel hopeful, excited and that we can collaborate for a positive future?
We are suddenly empowered, in control.
Don’t fight, be friends
What I believe we fail to see is that our relationship to tech is mirroring our global (and maybe interpersonal relationships) - conflict, suspicion, division, wish for dominance. We are worried about being replaced, about being dominated, about being exterminated. While we talk a lot about kindness and all colours of activist movements for minorities and repressed have flourished (thank god), we are nonetheless growing more critical, evangelical and dismissive of others. Did you not just buy an avocado from Peru from the evil supermarket?
I wonder if the empowered mindset we need to adopt to fuse technology positively into our humanity will also shift how we fuse our fellow humans into a global society to bring a more tolerant and less divided world? We are actually all partners in this world - humans and technology and we need to create technology that can be our best partner whilst still respecting our humanness.
iHuman
What I now see as an imperative is the idea of creating humane technologies and being aware of how our work lives are impacted by technology. How can we change the way we live and work and reclaim our humanity/humanness/humaneness (whatever it needs to be called). There are already some organisations doing great work here, e.g. Center for Humane Technology (the guys that made The Social Dilemma and now The AI Dilemma).
I can’t imagine or want that our next generation of humans sit at a desk, in the tram or on the sofa staring at one screen or another for 16 hours a day scrolling through content, churning excels and powerpoints that no-one will look at, losing touch with their intuition by trawling over numbers and data because we are “data driven”, ignoring their fellow humans because they have KPIs to reach and being swept in a communication tornado of 100s of apps and 100s of chat channels and groups.
This doesn’t feel normal, healthy and even part of our human evolution. And yet this is what we do now as adults. I am exhausted and ready for change.
The Generation Z has been called notoriously difficult to work with, fickle, demanding, idealistic, spoilt. Actually I think they bring wonderful fresh qualities that are negatively reflected through our broken Gen X mirror. We absolutely need these humans as they will be the ones demanding change, demanding a disruption in our dysfunctional tech and work paradigms. I embrace and believe in them. They are not the problem but our underlying systems (education, work, technology, politics) are for not having adapted yet to them.
And I certainly want to believe that the Aquarius cosmic influence will bring a radical transformation in how we create and co-exist with technology, work and even love. We still have to do the work though. First stop, change mindset, be empowered, know who you are and look up at the stars.
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
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