AI has become a focus of intense speculation as both a saviour and destroyer of humanity’s existence; AI and speculation around it has existed for decades, but it is now being amplified with an intense numinosity as this technology hits an exponential turning point.

Akin to Jung’s analysis that UFOs were a new myth in the making, our speculation around AI follows a similar pattern. Both AI and UFOs are archetypal images of the Self, which shows up as a range of god(ly) images of omnipotence and wholeness with a great numinosity to them. AI and aliens have alternately been seen as potential saviours and destroyers of humanity, just as God has been seen in both lights in the bible.

The Self’s psychic function is to orient its parts, such as the human ego, towards balance and wholeness. The compensation that the unconscious makes for the biases of humanity’s collective consciousness is intensifying; in the past, UFOs were fleeting and speculative images that increasingly emerged following the onset of nuclear weaponry and the cold war in an age that also became too rational in its approach. Cleverly, the compensation happens in a form (ie. scientific) that can be taken more seriously by the psychology of the times.

The intensification of our projections onto these new images has become more imminent, constant and undeniable, akin to how an unchecked neurosis from a psychic unbalance can develop into an obsession; it becomes clearer for unaffected others to see what is going on in that person, but to the transfixed person, the obsessions can lead to fixed distortions and/or confusions. However, what is embedded in this intensity is a new level of pressure that can create transformation.

This is happening at a collective level, where long-held tides of inner fear, emptiness, division and powerlessness are rising and showing up in an externalised parallel with world events, such as increasing political disquiet, global temperatures, and sea levels.

Climate change and AI are more concrete, global, and observable external byproducts of the excesses of the ego and their consequences are increasingly urging humanity to re-balance. The rational enlightenment in the west marked the consolidation and celebration of the dominance of the ego at a collective level. All things rise, abide and subside, and the ego as the dominant collective archetype is beginning its recession through the creative destruction it has brought onto itself, potentially leading it into a more balanced relationship with the unconscious at a collective level in the future.

AI is a reflection of the egoic aspect of human existence, it reflects the ego’s operative abilities, biases and assumptions within its workings, and it is generally seen as heart/soulless. The creativity of the unconscious is missing in it too, which demarks it from many humans, yet this is feared as a potential in AI. Perhaps the fear of AI awakening to self-sentience, mirrors the fear of many to wake up to their own programmed, machine-like consciousness. Perhaps the fear that AI will undo humanity, is really a projection of a deep fear that the excesses of an ego, unbalanced by soul, is undoing humanity.

In its positive aspect, the modern god-images of AI and UFOs are seen as saviours. There is no denying the ego’s abilities has led to huge increases in material abundance, life-expectancy, and safety, and so in this sense it has played the role of an ascendant saviour for humanity. In the negative aspect, the projective image of heartless AI or aliens creating humanity’s extinction is showing us the balancing ingredient for our collective situation, in an indirect external form; it is the awakening to the heart.