Some Thoughts on "Pluribus"
[Mild spoilers ahead; if you haven’t seen the show, I’d suggest doing so before reading.]
Pluribus is a sci-fi TV series (streaming on Apple TV) based on the premise of an alien civilization taking over Earth. In a manner somewhat akin to films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, humans across the Earth are somehow transformed into comparatively blissful members of this invasive hive-mind culture.
Yet there are a few humans who, for mysterious reasons, seem immune to this takeover of consciousness, and are able to retain their ordinary human personalities - with all their virtues and vices.
The show centers primarily around one of those humans, a romance novelist and speaker named Carol. She develops an uneasy relationship with the aliens, who appear to be all-knowing but virtually incapable of any true individuality. Perhaps the most notable thing to be said about the depiction of this alien race is the fact each of them talks with the pronoun “We.” With one brief exception, none of them says “I” when talking. There’s no true individuality with the aliens.
On the other hand, Carol is most definitely an “I”!
One way of interpreting the alien presence in the show is to see them as an analogy for AI, particularly information systems like ChatGPT, Grok, and Google. All such platforms draw upon the collected knowledge of humanity, and definitely represent a “We” factor, not an “I” one. When you ask a question of Grok, for instance, it doesn’t respond from the standpoint of one individual’s experience but rather from a synthesis of all human knowledge. It’s strictly hive-mind.[1]
I don’t think it’s accidental this TV series is coming out at this particular time. To my mind, Carol’s relation to the visitors offers an analogy to our own unfolding relationship with AI right now.
Consider the show’s depiction of Carol struggling not to lose her individuality in the face of this highly impersonal force. That’s not much different from what we are now confronting in the face of the ever-expanding influence of AI.
For instance, it’s now possible to use AI to compose music, create art, write books, or even carve sculptures using advanced technology - things many of us used to believe could only be achieved by human creators. The upshot is, the more we rely on such tools, the less room there seems to be for personal self-expression. I recently heard a conversation with musician Billy Corgan in which he predicted that in just a few years many performers could well be conjuring AI-generated songs, adding their own little touches here and there, but ultimately calling it their own work. Think about that. Or, in a somewhat different vein, when we now call a company on the phone to ask a question but instead get an automated response rather than a human being, as alway used to be the case, how that does affect our sense of the world, or for that matter ourselves?
It’s possible TV series like Pluribus are appearing at this “Rubicon” time in history precisely because of challenges like this. The question that creative works like this (as well as films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the entire zombie movie genre) raise is a simple but important one: How do we retain our humanity in the face of this increasing depersonalization?
Notes
1. This impersonal and collective aspect of AI, and knowledge systems like Grok and ChatGPT, is astrologically related to the zodiacal sign of Aquarius. This is the sign which represents the elemental principle of Air, or mind, but at its most universal and collective. The entry of Pluto into Aquarius these last couple of years certainly seems to be accelerating our world’s transition into the Aquarian Age, not just in terms of AI technology but in a number of areas.
© 2026 Ray Grasse
Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer based in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, including The Waking Dream, When the Stars Align, and An Infinity of Gods. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.