Aquarius & Uranus
posted August 2023

Aquarius and its ruler Uranus are both associated with innovation, forward thinking, breaking down barriers, and technology.

For Uranian people, creative ideas can appear in sudden moments of inspiration, like lightning flashes. 

Aquarius’ symbol, the water bearer, can lead many to believe that it is a water sign, but Aquarius is an air sign, and what the water bearer is disseminating is knowledge.

Innovation and new ideas flourish when Uranus is highly activated or celestial bodies fall in Aquarius.

Those born with a prominent Uranus tend to be entrepreneurs or whistle blowers—Bill Gates with Uranus Rising; Elon Musk with Sun square Uranus; Steve Jobs with Jupiter conjunct Uranus in a Grand Cross  with Neptune, Mars, and Venus; Marc Cuban with Sun conjunct Uranus; Julian Assange with Sun square Uranus; and Edward Snowden with Jupiter and Uranus conjunct the Descendant opposite Mercury.

Pluto’s transit through Aquarius will enhance innovation. It is likely to correspond with author, futurist, and inventor, Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. Kurzweil (an Aquarius born February 12, 1948) postulates that while most things progress linearly, technological changes do not. Instead, tech change occurs exponentially—i.e., the pace of tech change accelerates over time.

Eventually a point is reached where changes happen so fast that predicting future trends becomes impossible. This is a corollary to Moore's Law which states that computer power doubles approximately every two years. The law of accelerating returns suggests that a process of exponential change now exists, far beyond what Moore could have imagined.

Kurzweil posits that 20,000 years of technological change will occur over the next 100 years. Every time an exponential technology reaches the end of its usefulness, another will take its place.

The Future is Faster than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler sites a particular path of how disruption occurs. First, digitalization. When a technology can be translated into binary code, it begins accelerating exponentially. Second, deception. Initially technologies progress slowly and have a hard time living up to their hype.

Third, disruption. When technologies begin to disrupt existing products, services, and industries—the 3-D printer for example. Fourth, demonetization. The cost of the product comes down.

Many of the changes that have already started will accelerate with Pluto in Aquarius, and many other changes that we cannot yet conceive of will follow.

While not all inventions occur with planets in Aquarius, the list of game-changing technology that has occurred with celestial bodies moving through Aquarius is impressive.

Here’s what we already know:

While crowdfunding history goes back to the 1700s, modern-day crowdfunding started in 1997 with Uranus in Aquarius. This gives budding entrepreneurs the ability to raise money outside of typical bank channels.

Smart shelf tech’s first known use was in supermarkets in 2003 with Neptune in Aquarius.

3D printing came into vogue in 2010 when Neptune, Jupiter, and Chiron were in Aquarius and Neptune and Uranus were in mutual reception.

Also in 2010 Softbank designed a robot capable of understanding human emotions.

In fashion Stich Fix, using artificial intelligence (AI)  for fashion fitting, was incorporated in 2011 with Neptune in Aquarius.

5G, now in use, will become more widely spread with Pluto in Aquarius. 5G speeds up downloads, so that what would once take 45 minutes in 3G, 21 seconds in 4G, now takes a few seconds in 5G.

Electric vehicles have already taken over car manufacturers. Wider use of autonomous cars is coming. And these cars already have the ability to gather data with miles. What’s expected in the future is cars as a service – no driver needed. 

Amazon is now testing self-driving vehicles in Las Vegas. Tesla has a self-driving mechanism on its cars (although its safety is widely disputed).

Elon Musk’s concept of a hyperloop may come into fruition. The hyperloop is a high-speed transportation network that uses magnetic levitation to propel passenger pods down vacuum tubes at speeds up to 760 miles per hour.  

Can flying cars be far away? Or a self-driving car that picks you up from your hyperloop journey and drives you to your destination.

Does all of this sound like science fiction? Science fiction has a way of predicting the future.  Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea depicted submarines long before their sophisticated use. The Jetson television show (1962-63) featured a housekeeping robot and an aerocar, as well as their home in a skypad apartment.

How many of us would have ever believed these things to be possible? Neurobiology provides the explanation. When the brain believes that the person benefitting isn’t the same one as the one making choices, the medial frontal cortex starts to shut down. Neurobiology makes us blind to what’s around the corner. (I’d love to know the difference in brain chemistry between the innovators and the rest of us skeptics. Perhaps artificial intelligence will someday help us figure that out.)

Artificial Intelligence, already in use, has the power to find hidden connections among obscure bits of data.  In emergency rooms, it has been found to be better at predicting sudden death from respiratory failure or cardiac arrests than doctors.  

New materials, new drugs, and the remaking of cyber security (as well as threats to it) are on the horizon.

In gene therapy, AI is likely to find connections between genes and protein cells that provide cures for previously incurable diseases. Of course, the negative side of this is that it can also find ways to produce designer babies.

As AI use expands, it will become more powerful—and scarier.

Chat GPT is now in popular use. You simply post a question in the chat box, and it hunts available sources for the answer. You get the answer almost immediately. It was widely introduced on March 13, 2023 with Pluto at the tail end of Capricorn. Pluto moved into Aquarius on March 23.

Pluto in a sign always brings out its dark side. It’s now easier than ever to post fake voice and video. This will become more widely used in propaganda, whether in use by one country against another, a political rival, or someone you’d just like to smear.

There are also potential problems regarding copyrights, as AI provides its answers by searching other people’s intellectual property.

AI will enhance “surveillance capitalism” capabilities, the term coined by Shoshana Zuboff. Her book Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019, exposes how Silicon Valley surveillance capitalism has moved into every economic sector.

Evidence of “big brother” watching is readily seen by advertising following us around on the web when we’ve looked at an item on line. What she calls the “behavioral futures market” predicts our behavior and is bought and sold to modify our behavior. Europe is far ahead of the United States in reigning this in.

The other frightening phenomenon of AI is that will likely replace workers. Yale University Richard Foster believes that 40% of Fortune 500 companies will be gone in 10 years, replaced by upstarts. Robotics are already being used on farms, in operating rooms, and bricklaying. 

Yet, fear of the future has accompanied every technological breakthrough. The car replaced the horse and buggy, changing the transportation industry. There was fear that computers would replace workers, but instead created whole new fields of work. 

Reed Hastings, founder of LinkedIn and an AI investor, calls AI “the cognitive intelligence revolution,” which will be similar to the industrial revolution.

So we’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds for us. It will be very likely far from what we expect.

Joyce Levine of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is professional astrologer with 40+ years experience. Her clients include individuals, couples, families, and businesses. Joyce is the former Chair of NCGR and former President of its Boston Chapter. She is the winner of the Regulus Award for Community Service at UAC2012. For more information, see www.joycelevine.com. Email: joycel@joycelevine.com

Want to find out about yourself or how Pluto in Aquarius will affect you,  call Joyce at
617-354-7075 or e-mail for an appointment.

Joyce Levine specializes in helping people recognize their natural abilities and use them to overcome their personal obstacles to success and to take action at precisely the right time to achieve the results they desire.