For over three decades, my art studio has served as a creative crucible for the exploration of life’s essential interconnected nature. It is a laboratory in which the elements of the artist’s hand and the unfolding of the natural world merge and alchemically bond. In between paintings, through my studio window, I watch a small patch of ancient Surrey woodland constantly evolve. Nothing is stationary there despite the occasional illusion of stillness. Everything is in motion. Everything relates to everything else, whether in space, through the mycorrhizal fungal networks communicating through the thin ribbons of mycelium1 in the soil or the consciousness that infuses and animates the intelligence coursing through every aspect of existence. There is no meaningful separation in any of it other than our own misguided perception that there is.

I love the pace of the woodland. I love its smell, its predators and prey, the symbiotic interdependence of its individuated constituents, its harmonious balance, its grace, and its autonomous creativity. Most of all, I love its evident intelligence.

Under the illuminating focus of this week’s Sagittarius Full Moon, the role humanity plays in that natural order of intelligence sits at something of an existential crossroads. In astrological tradition Sagittarius is the sign of the archer aiming for higher truth as the protector of the wild, a keen defender of nature's untamed spirit. Under its lunar light, the shadowy target of our own creative intelligence is being cast in stark, industrially automated relief. The shadow that looms largest across our tiny neighbourhood in the cosmic landscape is cast by the greatest fiction in human history: the biggest lie of all those lies we have come to tell ourselves daily. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its ultimate hubristic evolution, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), are as dark as a shadow gets.

There comes a moment in the growth of any tangled thicket – to use a woodland metaphor – where the brambles are so dense that they no longer provide shelter and begin to strangle the life out of the soil that feeds them. Nutrition from the canopy struggles to reach the earth. The warmth of the sun and reviving moisture from rain are also deflected by the foliage above. The ground beneath the thicket dries, cracks and becomes barren until eventually even the brambles can no longer be supported and die back. Has humanity reached an equivalent moment? Are our recent ‘intelligently’ devised means of self-protection, the complex, impenetrable thickets of our own misperception, choking and destroying the naturally intelligent ecosystems on which we depend? Conflating ‘intelligence’ with the destruction of the very biosphere that birthed our species doesn’t strike me as being very intelligent at all.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

To remain human, to remain humane, and to protect the living planet that sustains us, we must start to have the courage to put down the digital tools that are rapidly becoming our masters. There is a strong case to, quite literally, dismantle the machine before the machine dismantles, or actively destroys, anything that does not align with its expanding, completely illusory sense of what is ‘real’.

Sagittarius demands honesty. It loathes the reductionist, meat suit mentality that views humans as mere data processors, a grossly oversimplified statistic in the means of production. Throughout the 21st century, we have been fed a diet of digital shadows, curated by algorithms that isolate us in darkened rooms, staring at glowing glass. What’s more, we’ve lapped it up. We’ve devoured the toxic concoction. We argue about the shape of the shadows – the latest AI-generated image, the deepfake speech, the automated essay – oblivious to the fact that the shadow presented is not the thing itself, a mere facsimile of something real once felt or experienced before the post-truth era took root, and mostly a waste of time and energy. We piss our heartfelt emotions up against a meaningless wall of our own uncaring design and then wonder why we spend our non-scrolling hours exhausted.

AI is the ultimate lie. It is a statistical echo of our past, masquerading as a participant in our future. As a defender of the simple realities of painting, artificial intelligence lacks the gravity of the brush or dripping paint finding its own path down a canvas. It has no understanding of the joy felt in the creative process of painting, regardless of outcome: a mark made, a note sung, a movement danced. When we delegate our creativity, our judgement, and our human connections to a silicon oracle, we are not being augmented. We are being filed before the possibility of being erased.

The Sagittarius Full Moon illuminates this deception. The energetic signature of this fire sign is meant to light the way toward wisdom, not to fuel the server farms that are currently consuming our planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. Every query we send into the void of an AI model requires a staggering amount of water and electricity – resources stolen from the very environment we claim to cherish. To pursue AGI without conscious, democratically governed constraint is to pursue the vague possibility of spectres at the expense of the living.

Keeping it real

I have written in previous articles of the "impersonal connection with generic creative activity" running throughout my art practice: the idea that my creative output is merely a reflection of the evolutionary lineage of life itself – a means of personal alignment with the real deal. I will always champion the sanctity in the handmade – in the human focus required to thread a needle or the patience to wait for a watercolour wash to dry. These small acts are testimonies to our existence.

AGI seeks to automate and digitally commodify this testimony. It aims to bypass the struggle, the mental fog, the creative blocks and long periods of unhurried, quiet contemplation that lead to true insight. If we allow a machine to ‘think’ for us, we gradually begin to lose the capacity to feel. We become "unconscious” individuals as the psychologist Jung warned – puppets to patterns we no longer control.

Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.

(Carl Jung)

The humanitarian crisis of AI is already here. It is not just the loss of jobs but the loss of meaning. When the distinction between a human voice and a synthetic one dissolves, our unending union with the diversity of existence is severed with one surgical slice of a digital blade. We are training ourselves to be bad listeners and observers, far too readily accepting of the 'one per cent lie’ wrapped in a slick interface or swift to abandon the empathetic instinct that helps us understand the needs of others.

A call for an immediate moratorium on AI

I was fortunate to recently stumble into an unusually informed pub conversation on the marketplace development of AI with a tech sector business solutions advisor. His observations were stark on a number of fronts. Primarily, he cited indicators that the current levels of financial investment (needed to attain the holy grail of AGI) couldn’t continue without evidence or even a plan of a return. According to their own (probably conservative) figures, the tech giant OpenAI has to burn $660 billion of debt before it can turn a profit. OpenAI is just one of the increasingly few huge tech companies2 that currently drive the chronically overvalued global market tech ‘bubble’. The increasing consolidation of those world markets in so few hands makes an economic crash highly likely, as a profitable economic model currently doesn’t exist.

In predicting that the investment bubble will burst, my friend thankfully pronounced that humanity is, for the moment, safe from immediate extermination at the hands of its own AI creation; however, he did outline the potential for ruinous hardship en route to economic meltdown.

  • A ‘race to the bottom’ by large companies: a competitive scenario where businesses progressively lower their standards-reducing wages, cutting corners on quality, disregarding safeguarding, environmental and ethical stewardship, or slashing prices – to gain a competitive advantage or attract investment. This destructive spiral often leads to poorer working conditions, lower-quality products, and reduced social welfare, prioritising short-term profit over long-term sustainability.

  • The upshot is likely to be mass white-collar unemployment. White-collar workers3 hold most debt (mortgages), so mass defaults on those loans could potentially trigger a housing market and banking crash (circa 2008). Messy, with less likelihood, post-2008, of governments being able to raise finance to prop up the lenders.

  • The consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few technocrats with dubious agendas that run the AI companies will make these individuals richer and therefore more powerful than most nation states. Increasingly, governments have failed to impose international levers to tax them so the money made leaves the economic systems directed toward the welfare of all for the bulging pockets of the few.

  • Add to this the desperate race to the bottom of the tech giants themselves, laying off tens of thousands of workers to ‘prove’ the efficacy of AI to future investors, at the same time investing in each other’s portfolios in the vain hope of maintaining the unsustainable bubble across the sector. It’s a growing recipe for disaster.

The beast needs to be tamed and harnessed so that appropriate checks and balances can be applied to its development that are in the best interest of all people and the planet – not merely to gain a competitive edge. It might sound drastic, but the hungry monster needs to be stopped in its tracks now, and here’s why. The consumerist juggernaut fuelling the AGI dream/nightmare cannot be sated. It has no concept of ‘enough’. Consumerism requires more to always be more and is a key aspirational signature of info acquisition and storage. Its base drive is the fatiguing virus of human dissatisfaction. It will always want more because we always want more. More stuff, more info (however fallacious), more power, more resources.

Not until we face up to our own rampant dissatisfaction and reconnect with those life-enhancing experiences that rarely cost us, or the planet, a bean can we eventually have what we all want: peace and happiness. Until then we will continue to gorge on the most tasteless, illusory red herring of all time, miserable and unfulfilled with a side order of anxiety-laden digital guilt. Ironically, we will continue in our needless pursuit of the unreal when the true beauty of reality is always in plain sight, until finally, the only evidence left to discover of our post-post-apocalyptic society for future archaeologists (presumably from other solar systems) will be the non-biodegradable husks of our hubris. We do not need more intelligence; we need more presence.

Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

(David Byrne)

The Sagittarius Full Moon can serve as a final, clarifying beacon, stripping away the digital smog to reveal a singular truth: there is no substitute for the visceral pulse of the living world. While AI functions as an elaborate mirror of our past, it is essentially cold, derivative, and mathematically predictable. By comparison, the intelligence of the ancient Surrey woodland is a symphony of the present, effortlessly evolving to maintain its equilibrium in any given circumstance. The natural world is a spontaneous, carbon-based wisdom that does not require a server farm to exist, nor does it ask for our data in exchange for its beauty. Its inherent, enduring intelligence presides over every living cell in the ongoing conversation of existence with itself.

The self-defeating thicket of our own making may be dense, yet the path out is found not through faster processing but through deeper presence. The hand that holds the brush, the soil that nurtures the mycelium, and the heart that feels the weight of a moment are the true architects of reality. Artificial intelligence can simulate the shape of a leaf or the cadence of a poem, but it can never replicate the sacred spark within entropy, our inseparable part within the organic cycles of birth and decay – the glorious, uncalculated imperfections that constitute the unified perfection of existence.

We can continue to worship at the silicon altar and sleepwalk into a frictionless, hollow future, or we can reclaim our wakeful agency in the present. By choosing the tangible over the digital, the real over the unreal, and the interconnected forest over the isolating algorithm, we can help honour and preserve the sanctity of the human spirit and all it touches. The real world is not a problem to be solved by AGI; it is a miracle to be inhabited. Humanity is this evolutionary miraculous moment’s lucky temporary resident, so let’s not waste it. Let's shelve the glowing glass screen more regularly and step back into the light of the authentic, where intelligence is not programmed but witnessed as divinely omnipresent.

The marketing of life is complete when we find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see through a screen darkly.

(Toni Morrison)

References

1 Mycelium. (n.d.). From Wikipedia.
2 Investopedia. (n.d.). Magnificent 7 stocks: What you need to know. Investopedia. Retrieved May 20, 2026, from Investopedia.
3 White-collar worker. (n.d.). From Wikipedia.