Astrology and Social Media

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Astrology and Social Media

https://www.skyscript.co.uk/SM.html

Our latest site addition shows the result of a survey conducted amongst astrologers a few months ago, exploring our relationship with social media. Dru Ish has added a fascinating narrative to the results, raising many thought-provoking issues.

This has given me a lot to think about personally, and I’ve been musing on it for the last few weeks. One of the most pertinent ‘of the moment’ dilemmas for practising astrologers seems to be finding the balance in how much to expose (to be seen) without over-exposing or attempting to make this profound subject so user-friendly and consumer-accessible that it is stripped of its esoterica and philosophical depth.

There is a reminder in these results that social media apps are not really ‘free’ – we all need to consider the cost being paid, which in some cases might be measured by a compromise of integrity, or the ever-increasing rise of plagiarism as content providers (needing to feed their hungry followers) share unique content they played no part in mining or developing.

Then we have the added issue of the rise of Artificial Intelligence, which is now claiming full knowledge of astrology-available-for-all. We all need to be alert to the issues raised by this analysis – and astrological organisations should consider its findings and implications.

Thoughts, comments and suggestions are welcomed in this thread.

(For my part, this has made me aware of the need to simplify and protect my own SM presence – and more determined to secure the continued existence of this Skyscript forum, as a place where astrologers can meet and discuss the issues that connect us, without concern about likes, losing or gaining followers, or letting the focus of the discussion slip to individual egos, business promotion, or driving up attention to gain the power to influence some associated commercial concern).

Thanks Dru – for the valuable work you did here!

PS - the article is available as a web-read, a PDF file, an online flip-book, and an audio read-out, also provided by Dru.

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"People are starting to get sick of a life lived so intensely on the grid. They wish for more anonymity online. They're experiencing fatigue with ebooks, with dating apps, with social media. They're craving something else in this era of quantified selves, and tracked locations, and indexed answers to every possible question. Except, perhaps the questions of who you really are, and what life has in store for you."
https://psychstrology.com/project/the-a ... astrology/
Julie Beck 01/16/18
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Many years ago, I was working for a software company and we met a newly hired network admin in a company. Not sure he was even 25 years old. When we asked him to shut down a specific server in order to install our software, he brought us in a large room filled with cables. And he started to unplug cables randomly until we told him that our computer had been disconnected. My left brain twitched until I realized that he was handling his network as... a video game. Trials and errors!
The younger generation in astrology is very much like this.
There used to be a time when astrology was learned from mentorship of a teacher and a specific vision of the world. Today, everybody can learn from websites, social medias, forums and pdf available. How you learn is another question.
More than knowledge, astrology is developping new tools brought by AI and I can see the day when, without knowledge, a click on the keyboard will provide answers to our questions.
In recent years, I have seen many astrologers becoming famous over the web, not by their knowledge in the art but by other skills they have (good communicator, well-designed websites, original presentation, good psychologist and also sometimes sprinkles of mysticism or ancient wisdom). Yet, serious astrologers are out there with meaningful wisdom.
There will always be a place on the web for a forum like yours Deborah. Honesty and down-to-earth can go a long way.
But it is true that our vision of astrology is entering a new era and we must be sensitive to that.
Thanks for the meaningful discussions I have had with other astrologers in your forum. I truly appreciate.

Ouranos
Blessings!

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I remember arguing, years ago, against the sceptics' presentation of astrologers as wealthy fast cats driving around in Rolls Royces while smoking cigars - pointing out that when you take the media celebrities out of the equation, most astrologers are very hard-working, and many are likely to spend more on the study of astrology then they will earn from the practice of it.
That is still the case, yet there is definitely a worrying element now, in how some astrologers seem able to raise millions of dollars from their social media presence – which then gets invested in the teams they employ to make their social media presence even stronger – a never-ending cycle of increasing influence (and power to control the narrative) which has worrying strings attached to it.
I am not sure if this will play for international listeners, but the BBC recently published a podcast about the controlling influence of ‘The New Gurus’ – and this edition features the rising influence of astrologers on social media:
The relevant section is the 5 minutes starting from 3 minutes 30 seconds:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001gjcw

(Thanks to Mick O’Neil for giving me the heads-up to that)

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Unfortunately I think that everything gets cheapened during the age of the internet (or perhaps this is related to the age of Aquarius somehow.) Anything and everything is widgetized and commoditized for universal and cheap consumption while the "soul" of things dies. It seems to be all about the lowest common denominator.
Last edited by kubernetes on Mon Feb 06, 2023 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri

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thanks deb and ouranos

the audio file plays and i am on vancouver island, so i suspect anyone can listen to it..

i see these developments as the increasing role of technology in our lives.. social media itself is quite insidious as i see it... in fact, i try hard to avoid it at all costs as i don't like contributing to the corporations that control them... finding connections in websites run independently, such as skyscript is a much more attractive set up for me personally.. thank you for continuing on with skyscript! it is like an oasis in a desert of social media options!!

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Open Source AI and freeChatGPT has profound capabilities. Existing ChatGPT ,while answering our query, is analysing information ,for analogy, that will fill one full Indian Ocean.
Coming ChatGPT shall be capable of giving an thoughtful output after analysing all the informations , that can fill all the 5 Oceans@

Lets us consider or assume , if all the Astrological information ever documented,recorded including all sorts of Astrological books ever written or available in this world can be Processed and Analysed .....and then an Astrological Insight can be made out ( based on all the consolidated data, in a very similar manner , as a reasonable human being would do) then it would be huge huge service to a humankind.
"You are a Divine expression of the Universe"

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the newest new drug....... hum...

faith in god got replaced with

faith in science which is getting replaced with

faith in technology

interesting developments as always...

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james_m wrote:finding connections in websites run independently, such as skyscript is a much more attractive set up for me personally.. thank you for continuing on with skyscript! it is like an oasis in a desert of social media options!!
Hi Deb: Just to piggyback on James' comment. Thanks so much for keeping Skyscript going as an alternative to the social media giants.
~AJ

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james_m wrote:the newest new drug....... hum...

faith in god got replaced with

faith in science which is getting replaced with

faith in technology

interesting developments as always...
Somehow , the concept of God has inherent Higher Intelligence ingrained....so Dynamics of Physics and Pure Sciences has the flavour of God ' s Blessings bestowed , in my opinion.
"You are a Divine expression of the Universe"

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Lets us consider or assume , if all the Astrological information ever documented,recorded including all sorts of Astrological books ever written or available in this world can be Processed and Analysed .....and then an Astrological Insight can be made out ( based on all the consolidated data, in a very similar manner , as a reasonable human being would do) then it would be huge huge service to a humankind.
Does astrology count for much without the 'engagement' of the astrologer? I say not. Incidentally, Dru is conducting a new survey now to gather thoughts of astrologers on the use of apps and AI - so if you have opinions, stick them in at:

https://druish.com/astrology-apps-ai-community-survey/

Reading the WP page about ChatGPT, the comment that strikes me is this one:

"In January 2023, after being sent a song written by ChatGPT in the style of Nick Cave,[54] the songwriter himself responded on The Red Hand Files[55] (and was later quoted in The Guardian) saying the act of writing a song is "a blood and guts business ... that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness.??? He went on to say "With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it."

- and that is just about where I land, personally, on the use of AI in astrology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT

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I am following this guy - Yoshua Bengio
https://yoshuabengio.org/category/ai-for-social-good/

Recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, earning him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,??? with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

He is a Full Professor at Université de Montréal, and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program as Senior Fellow and acts as Scientific Director of IVADO.

In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize and in 2022, became the computer scientist with the highest h-index in the world. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, Knight of the Legion of Honor of France and Officer of the Order of Canada.

Concerned about the social impact of AI and the objective that AI benefits all, he actively contributed to the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.
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Many years ago, he was offered a prestigious position with Microsoft but he declined their offer because he wants to keep doing his research with no strings attached.
Excerpts from a conversation on a Microsoft blog
https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/a-conver ... ua-bengio/

For you as an expert in deep learning, what’s the most exciting work that you’re seeing right now?

Bengio: Right now I’m most excited about the progress we’re making in what’s called unsupervised learning. So this is one area where the current state of the art in machine learning and deep learning is way below what humans can do. A two-year-old child can learn by simply observing and interacting with the world. For example, she can understand physics without having to take classes and understand gravity and pressure and so on by playing and observing. This is unsupervised learning. We’re far from that kind of ability, but the good news is we’re making pretty impressive progress in that direction. It’s very important, because in order for machines to go beyond these very limited tasks they currently are good at we’ll need unsupervised learning.

We hear a lot of speculation about what artificial intelligence can do. Can you give us a sense of how close we are to creating artificial intelligence or deep learning techniques that do actually mimic how humans think and act?

Bengio: I get a lot of these kinds of questions, and my answer is always, ‘I don’t know.’ And I think no serious scientist should be giving you a straight answer, because there’s just a lot of unknowns. I mean, by definition we’re doing research in this field because we don’t know how to solve some set of problems. We know we’re making progress. We can guess that things are moving in the right direction. But how long is it going to take to really address the more difficult problems of more abstract understanding, for example? It’s impossible to answer. Is it five years? Is it 15 years? Is it 50 years? Right now we’re seeing some obstacles and we think we can tackle them. But maybe this is just a mountain hiding other mountains.
Blessings!

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Thank you Deb!
For giving the new Survey link @ druish.com wherein I have also participated and submitted my response.
My sincere thanks , to all the concerned personalities ,for giving us this opportunity to participate and reflect.
Does astrology count for much without the 'engagement' of the astrologer?
AI shall process all the information as an Astrologer , normally processes the various elements of natal chart, transits and progressed chart to arrive at some potentialities...

Much much more advanced and depth of processing all possible inputs to give a sort of single report output ...lets say when a person buys all the astro.com /computer generated reports (as been previously described by Mr Alois Treindl how he conceptualised those reports and wrote a programme for those in association with the Professional Astrologers) and then again one Astrologer study all those reports and give his/her analysis of likely outcomes.
"You are a Divine expression of the Universe"