Editing Humanity with ♄-♆ in Aries, Part One: LLMs and the Delete Button

A Present History Lesson

The State of the Ether-net: a Review

In previous articles on Pluto on the Leo-Aquarius axis within Ages of Air, I explored a 3-tiered problem emerging from our collective use of LLMs that is disrupting the knowledge economy(1):

Problem 1

There is a collective behavioral shift away from primary sources and toward platforms that are free, fast, and frictionless, but are also slowly eroding thought ownership. By removing authors and aggregating information, LLMs simultaneously erase our intellectual ancestral lineage and create the illusion of a “public commons”(2) that belongs to no one and everyone.

Problem 2

This disconnection of knowledge from original authorship—and the illusion that less understanding and creative effort are required—is seducing us into believing we are generating ideas when we are actually acquiring it.

This is easy for us to do because of the “frictionless” nature of LLMs coupled with our brains’ biological impulse to seek the path of least resistance. Anyone can ask an LLM for an aggregation of facts, but that does not mean they created it, “own” it, or understand it. In essence, we declare ourselves primordial creators when we are, in fact, acting as knowledge colonialists.

Problem 3

Finally, if proper knowledge attribution is not happening, and if we believe we’re creating knowledge that we’re largely acquiring, then the process of actual knowledge creation becomes hollow and less meaningful.

Creativity and meaning-making are core components of what it means to be human. Therefore, our use of LLM’s begs the question: if we are outsourcing knowledge “creation” to LLMs, are we editing out our humanity—or reinventing it?

They → We → Me

My interests and experience as a global counselor, astrologer, and community development professional have shaped my ability to observe and name collective behavior for the purpose of awareness-building and (hopefully) change-making. Exploring the above dynamics led me into this series about the Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries—the sign of “I am”—and our imminent existential choices to redefine what makes us human.

I will be exploring two primary questions that contextualize how we have handled similar moral thresholds in the past, and illuminate the choices before us now:

1. From an ontological vantage point: if we aren’t creating, are we still exercising what it means to be human?

2. From a human development vantage point: how is growing reliance on LLMs and AI affecting our attention, humility, patience, moral responsibility, and sense of time?

To be clear, I believe there are ways to use LLMs ethically and creatively that enhance our humanity. LLMs are not the base problem but the economic incentives surrounding them certainly are part of it.

However, we are at a unique point in recognizing an unconscious societal behavior shift that requires awareness and reflection if we are to engage this epistemic transformation meaningfully. It is easy to focus on what “they” (AI systems and the corporations that build them) are doing to us. It is far more empowering to focus on what “I” am doing—and what I can change.

Knowing How the Machine Works (and Why We’re So Eager to Grease It)

The two questions I’ve posed stem from LLMs’ current model: free, fast, and frictionless. To understand the hidden costs of this “triple F” model in a production-oriented culture, we need to consider how we arrived here.

We’ve been on an accelerating hamster wheel since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Inventions such as the steam engine, cotton gin, telegraph, and mass steel production set us on a trajectory of continually finding ways to save time, money, and effort.3 For a time, these innovations were extraordinary and solved multiple problems at once.

Take the washing machine.

While living in Uganda, I washed my clothes by hand. It wasn’t just the time required to heat water, soak, scrub, and rinse. It was also choosing the right time to wash amidst my class schedule. Start too late in the day—or when it was cloudy—and the clothes wouldn’t dry. If drying was delayed, checking for tsetse fly eggs was essential to prevent bites and ‘sleeping sickness’. Who knew a washing machine could indirectly prevent a neurological disease?

But every tool that makes life faster and easier carries hidden consequences. Before smartphones, we memorized phone numbers. Now, if you lose your phone and your contacts aren’t synced, you become a ghost.

Today’s technological promises of time-saving often operate as cultural bait-and-switches. “Free time” once implied contemplation, prayer, moral reasoning, civic participation, and time with loved ones. Now, if we have it, “free time” becomes recovery so we can return to work, optimize output, and consume curated stimulation. Even when we gain time, we rarely fill it with rest, reflection, or connection. We fill it with more tasks.

This creates a negative feedback loop that goes something like this:

Technology promises efficiency → efficiency produces surplus time → surplus time creates normative pressure to increase output → increased output requires the need for more time-saving → more time-saving requires more technology → technology promises efficiency…

In addition to a productivity-driven culture, this loop is also generated by a quantitative understanding of time as opposed to qualitative and is seen most vividly in how we “spend” the time we’ve “saved.” Netflix famously illuminated this when they stated that their biggest competitor is sleep.(4) If attention is harvested and measured by minutes spent viewing or interacting with a product, then the state of our attention begins to matter less. If this is the goal, then a great model for winning consumer “attention” is one that seduces and lulls a person into a trance-like state so that they spend more time within that model (hence our cultural catch-phrases like “zoning out.”)

When it comes to knowledge creation, LLMs may be “free,” but the time we believe we are saving is “paid” for with fragmented attention, hollow competence, and relational disconnection. They may be “fast,” but in a productivity-obsessed culture, our sense of time has been skewed, chaining us to a hamster wheel that speeds up instead of slows down and doesn’t “arrive” at its benefits.

Microwaved AI Dinners and Decreased Mental Exercise

The “frictionless” quality of LLMs also raises questions about the quality and ethics of what we receive from these platforms. As I’ve covered previously, LLMs do not currently have access to gated, password protected, or paywalled sites (though clearly shadow libraries aren’t off the table). This means that material requiring subscription or purchase resists aggregation but also implicitly reduces visibility as attention shifts toward LLM platforms.

This creates a catch-22:

Those who invest substantial effort in producing quality work (writers, academics, journalists) are disincentivized from having their work aggregated and anonymized. Yet when they do not feed their work into AI-digestible platforms, their ideas become less discoverable.

This entrance fee suggests a nuance between being informed versus being formed by what we’re feeding ourselves. We are not only shaped by what we consume intellectually but also from a human development vantage point.

Ideally, when we do not know something, we pursue the answer. But the more accustomed we become to microwaved information, the less tolerance we have for effort or even the state of “not knowing.”

Intellectual struggle builds resilience. Without it, we begin to equate intellectual struggle with inefficiency. Reduced resilience directly impacts effortful attention, tolerance for frustration, patience with delay, and comfort with unresolved questions. Our intellectual resilience also determines how much effort we devote to understanding or creating knowledge and whether we take responsibility for our thoughts. Engaging that struggle cultivates “intellectual humility”(5) rather than swinging between arrogance and disengagement.

Burn Baby, Burn (Those Empty AI Calories)

AI-mediated knowledge is fast and frictionless, but friction is how we create fire—the elemental symbol of creativity. As I noted earlier, creativity is central to how we develop and define ourselves as human beings. Fanning that flame is our epistemic purpose.

So what is tangibly at stake here? If knowledge “creation” becomes free, fast, and frictionless, the cost may include:

• fragmented attention,

• hollow competence,

• knowledge colonization,

• loss of intellectual patience, resilience, and humility,

• decreased responsibility for one’s development, words, and actions,

• and an increasing dissociation of what it means to be human.

Many are asking:

“At what point does AI become conscious?”

But perhaps we should also ask:

“At what point does humanity become unconscious?”

I do not believe AI necessitates a dystopic Matrix. I’m commenting on a collective behavior shift. There are other ways to meaningfully cultivate knowledge outside of LLMs in this Age of AI(r), and each of us has agency in choosing them. Still, this moment presses us toward a question we have revisited throughout history:

“What does it mean to be human?”

This is the question Aries—the sign of “I am”—returns us to.

In Part Two of this series, I will examine the theme I believe Aries and LLMs are leading us toward: transhumanism.