We keep asking whether artificial intelligence can think. I’m beginning to wonder whether that’s the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking what artificial intelligence is doing to the way human beings think.
Not whether we’re intelligent. Not whether we can operate a phone, pay a bill or successfully locate the password we apparently created during a nervous breakdown in 2019. I mean actually thinking: sitting with an idea, questioning it, changing your mind, making a connection nobody handed you, wondering whether the question itself might be wrong.
That feels particularly worth considering while Mercury in Libra forms a trine to Uranus retrograde in Gemini.
Mercury is associated with thought, language, writing, information and communication. Uranus deals with invention, disruption, technology, sudden change and the occasional idea that walks into the room without asking anyone’s permission. Mercury is in Libra and Uranus is in Gemini, two air signs, so the territory here is unmistakably mental.
For anyone new to astrology, a trine simply means that two planets are roughly 120 degrees apart. It’s traditionally considered an easy or harmonious relationship. Some planetary aspects are two people arguing in a parking lot. A trine is two people discovering they already have each other’s phone number.
Mercury and Uranus have plenty to discuss.
Artificial intelligence has quietly changed something human beings have been doing since we developed language: trying to figure things out. We used to have a question and then go looking for an answer. Now the answer practically meets us at the door.
You can ask AI to explain a legal document, summarize a philosophy book, plan dinner, fix your grammar, help with a business idea and tell you why the basil plant looks depressed. This is incredible. It is also very strange.
For most of history, getting information required some effort. You found the book, asked the teacher, went to the library, called somebody who knew more than you did or read three pages before discovering you had the wrong book.
Now information arrives almost immediately. And whenever something becomes easy to obtain, having it becomes less impressive.
That may be what is beginning to happen to answers.
If everybody can get an answer, the valuable person may become the person who knows what to ask.
This is where Mercury in Libra gets much more interesting than the usual description of “diplomatic communication.” Libra compares. It weighs one thing against another. It notices contradictions. It wants to know whether two arguments really deserve equal weight and whether somebody quietly changed the rules halfway through the conversation.
Mercury in Libra doesn’t just want information. It wants to know whether the information holds up.
That matters now because AI can produce a beautiful answer that is wrong. It can produce an intelligent-sounding answer that isn’t particularly intelligent. Human beings have always had a weakness for confusing confidence with competence. Now confidence comes with flawless spelling.
Apparently we have invented technology capable of putting a necktie on nonsense.
Someone still has to recognize the nonsense.
Then there is Uranus in Gemini, which is almost comically appropriate for the moment we’re living through. Gemini is associated with communication, language, learning and the movement of information. Uranus disrupts whatever it touches. Put the two together and the ways we write, learn, communicate and exchange knowledge become experimental territory.
We’re already arguing about what counts as writing, what counts as art, what counts as research and even what counts as authorship. Is using AI cheating? Collaborating? Creating? Curating? Or are we trying to describe something genuinely new with vocabulary invented for an older world?
Sometimes technology changes faster than language.
With Uranus retrograde, the disruption also turns inward. Eventually we have to look at ourselves. What do I actually know? What do I merely know how to retrieve? What did I create? What did I curate? What was suggested to me? Would I have arrived at this thought without being prompted?
That last question is uncomfortable enough to be useful.
The conversation about AI tends to become dramatic very quickly. Either it’s going to make everybody brilliant or humanity will become one enormous couch potato while robots write Shakespeare.
I suspect reality will be much more interesting.
AI will probably make some people intellectually lazier. It may make other people intellectually more dangerous.
Give a powerful tool to someone who wants finished answers and you can make consumption extraordinarily efficient. Give the same tool to someone who cannot stop thinking and something completely different happens. They ask another question. They disagree with the answer. They change the premise. They connect subjects that weren’t supposed to be sitting at the same table.
The machine hasn’t replaced their thinking. It has given their thinking something to push against.
Same tool. Different human.
That distinction may become one of the defining differences of the AI era.
It also changes the conversation about originality. We’ve traditionally judged creativity by the finished thing: the paragraph, painting, photograph, design or song. But if machines can participate in producing all of those things, maybe originality doesn’t disappear. Maybe we discover that we were looking for it too far downstream.
Before the paragraph came the idea. Before the idea came the connection. Before the connection came somebody noticing something other people didn’t.
AI may be pushing originality upstream.
What did you notice? Why did you choose one possibility and reject another? Why did you ask that particular question? Why did everybody else walk past something that made you stop?
That may be where human creativity becomes more valuable, not less.
The danger, as I see it, isn’t necessarily that AI will make people stupid. Something much quieter could happen. It could make us passive.
There’s a difference.
Human beings learn something from struggling with ideas. Sometimes you have to write the awful paragraph before discovering the good one underneath it. Sometimes confusion is productive. Sometimes looking for one answer causes you to stumble across a better question.
I’m not suggesting we should worship difficulty. I have no desire to return to a civilization where finding one obscure fact requires three horses and a letter of introduction. Convenience is wonderful. But convenience deserves examination when we stop noticing what it has replaced.
If AI writes the first draft, summarizes the book, explains the argument, suggests the response and completes the sentence, eventually we have to ask which part we are still doing.
That isn’t an anti-AI question. It’s a human one.
Use the machine. Ask enormous questions. Learn faster. Explore subjects you might never have reached otherwise. Challenge it. Argue with it. Make it explain itself. Tell it when the answer is boring. Make it try again.
Just don’t become the least interesting participant in your own conversation.
Perhaps that is where Mercury trine Uranus becomes most useful. Mercury in Libra asks us to judge what is placed before us. Uranus in Gemini asks whether the way we’ve been thinking about it needs to change.
And together they raise a much more interesting question than whether machines will eventually become more intelligent than people: what kinds of human intelligence will still be worth developing?
Memory? We already hand plenty of that to our phones. Calculation? Calculators have been humiliating us for years. Formatting? Please take it. Nobody’s spiritual destiny depends on adjusting margins.
But curiosity, judgment, taste, meaning, moral responsibility and the ability to recognize when a very impressive answer is answering a very stupid question?
I’d keep those.
Especially curiosity.
A machine capable of producing answers is extraordinary. A human being who stops producing questions is another matter.
Maybe original thought in the age of AI won’t mean knowing everything or creating everything without assistance. Perhaps it will be something much older and much harder to automate: the stubborn human ability to look at what everybody else is looking at and notice something different.
The future may give us more answers than any generation in history has ever possessed.
Fine.
Then become someone worth giving answers to.
Garazi Izar | The Sacred Interference