C.G. Jung, Alchemy, and AI
When OpenAI named its models Sol, Terra, and Luna, it thought it was choosing pretty words. When it crowned its newest flagship Astra — the stars — it thought it was simply reaching higher. It wasn't. Beneath that naming lies a 4,000-year-old story — one that alchemists, Freud and Jung, and the myths of nearly every culture have been quietly replaying ever since: the assumption that one kind of mind must rank above the others, and that transcendence means escaping the ones below. Drawing on Jung's own Mysterium Coniunctionis and a lifetime of work on complementarity, Dr. Howard Teich traces how this ancient sun-over-moon pattern shaped everything from Greek mythology to the atomic bomb — and asks whether the intelligence we're building right now will finally break it, or simply automate it. Part depth psychology, part cautionary tale, this talk offers a strikingly different lens on what AI actually is, and what we still get to decide about it.