AI Can Calculate Your Birth Chart. But Can It Be an Astrologer?

More than twenty years after hearing that observation, it seems remarkably relevant to the debate about AI and astrology.

Because technology is becoming exceptionally good at the mathematics.

It’s the artist I’m less convinced about.

Astrology has always needed technology

There’s a misconception that computers and astrology are strange bedfellows.

They aren’t.

“An astrologer must have the imagination of an artist combined with the skill of a mathematician.”

Jonathan Cainer

Long before ChatGPT arrived, professional astrologers were using computers to calculate charts. Before computers, astrologers relied on printed ephemerides and tables of houses, working through calculations that software can now perform almost instantaneously.

Jonathan Cainer himself was involved in developing astrological software remarkably early. In the 1980s, he worked with programmer Stephen Lord on one of the first modern astrology computer programs.

Lord later recalled trying to squeeze calculations of the solar system into just 8K of computer memory while Jonathan concentrated on writing the interpretations.

Four decades later, that division of labour suddenly looks very familiar.

The computer handles the numbers.

The astrologer decides what they mean.

Calculation isn’t interpretation

This distinction matters enormously when we talk about AI astrology.

Calculating that Mars forms a particular aspect to Saturn is one thing.

Understanding how that might manifest in somebody’s life is another.

Astrology contains an enormous number of variables. A competent astrologer doesn’t simply identify one planetary aspect, retrieve its definition and move on to the next.

A chart has to be considered as a whole.

Some factors reinforce others. Some contradict them. Some deserve considerably more attention than others.

Then there’s the person sitting in front of you.

Two people can experience remarkably similar astrological influences in completely different ways because they’re different human beings with different histories, personalities, circumstances, ambitions, fears and choices.

That’s where mathematics starts handing the job over to something much harder to quantify.

Judgement.

AI and Astrology: AI has an advantage

None of this means astrologers should dismiss AI. Quite the opposite.

Its potential usefulness to astrology is enormous.

An AI system can process quantities of information that would overwhelm a human being. It doesn’t become tired after analysing twenty charts. It can draw on an enormous body of astrological information and compare vast quantities of data almost instantaneously.

But there’s an important catch.

But where does imagination come from?

This is where Cainer’s observation becomes interesting.

In the shared world of AI and Astrology, supposed AI eventually becomes flawless at the mathematical side.

It calculates every chart perfectly. It identifies every relevant aspect. It has access to thousands of years of astrological literature and can retrieve any traditional interpretation instantly.

Has it therefore become a brilliant astrologer?

I don’t think so.

A talented astrologer does something more difficult.

They make connections.

They see symbolism and recognise how it might relate to a situation nobody writing an astrology textbook fifty years ago could possibly have anticipated.

They find an analogy that suddenly makes an abstract planetary combination understandable.

They know when the textbook interpretation doesn’t quite fit.

And sometimes they look at a collection of astrological factors and see something that isn’t explicitly written anywhere.

That’s imagination.

The artist and the mathematician

Perhaps we’re approaching a point where Cainer’s description of an astrologer needs updating.

For centuries, the astrologer had to be both mathematician and artist.

Technology has gradually taken over much of the mathematics.

AI will take over even more.

But that doesn’t necessarily leave the astrologer with less to do. It might allow the best astrologers to concentrate on the part of astrology that machines find hardest.

Interpretation. Context. Judgement. Symbolism. Empathy. Imagination.

Jonathan Cainer understood technology unusually well for an astrologer of his generation. He embraced computers when most people didn’t have one in their homes.

Yet what ultimately made millions of people read his forecasts wasn’t his ability to calculate planetary positions.

Computers could already do that.

It was what happened after the calculation.

Perhaps that’s the real question AI astrology needs to answer.

The machine may eventually become a better mathematician than any astrologer who ever lived. But can it ever become the artist?

Thank you for reading.

Jeff Prince
Astrologer & Development Manager, Horoscope Services