Picture this: You go see a Tarot Card Reader. Upon entering the room, you notice it’s empty apart from a chair for you. Facing the chair is a screen, surrounded by a red curtain. A friendly voice asks you to state your question. After a few seconds, cards appear on the screen, are shuffled and then three selected. A movie starts playing on the screen, depicting the answer. It’s surreal, the answer was so quick and as the movie plays, you notice it’s depicting scenes that reflect the narrators voice as it answers your question. It may even have your face on a character. Alternative scenes play out in front of you, all based on the interpretation of the cards.
What’s weird or not weird, depending on your view of Tarot Cards, is that AI is generating the answer for you.
It’s not impossible for AI to reach this level. Certainly, Artificial Intelligence can or could interpret cards based on a vast database of previous readings. It can ‘learn’ to vary its answer depending on the interplay of the cards. Given a database of previous interpretations of the cards, it is easy for AI to say how the Ace of Swords affects The Fool. In other words, AI can do what any proficient tarot card reader can do – provide a coherent answer based on the cards selected.
AI can even use natural language processing and data analysis to provide different answers even if the same cards were drawn for two readings.
There is no great mystery in having a set of meanings for the cards and relaying that to the client. In a way, that’s how every Tarot Card Reader begins. Information from books, friends, the internet are all jumbled up in our brain and somehow, the things we need to remember stick with us. As we become more proficient, we begin to interpret how the cards interplay with each other, how they affect each other and point to different outcomes for the query being asked.
Having a machine do this is easy. Where the difference occurs is whether you accept that there is a another level to the cards. Are they just a database of information that can be stored, the same way we might remember an archetype? Is a Tarot Card reading a mechanical affair or is there an element involved that cannot be understood by a machine? In other words, do our senses, consciousness or Spirit from another world affect the way we read cards in a manner a machine cannot?
Let’s expand on this. You are reading the cards. The Five of Cups shows up. It casts a lonely figure in a black cloak looking downcast. The card appears bleak. Cups are spilled on the ground, only two remain standing.
From somewhere, you have a strong inclination that this is not the querent, but somebody related to them. Even stranger, you know it to be their father, sad that he only barely held onto his emotional connection to his children. He laments missed emotional connections with them in the past, not recognising that the two cups still standing represent his current connection to them and that perhaps, he should turn to recognise what he now has and work from there instead of lamenting the past.
Can AI interpret this scenario? Yes, AI might recognise from its database that the figure in the Five of Cups might not be the client. But there is a seemingly impossibility to it recognising correctly who the figure is.
Even we cannot say how we recognise who the figure is. We just have a sense, an intuition, a voice or feeling that says, “This is their father.” From the depths of somewhere, we have a little voice in our head that says ‘Father‘. It’s not based on any database, previous learning or something the client says. Intuition takes over.
It is this type of scenario that AI cannot replace. AI, as it currently is, follows a set of algorithms that even at their best, can only offer data based on what is stored in their database. Even if it had the option of identifying the figure as a ‘Father’, it would also have the option of identifying the figure as a ‘mother’, ‘friend’, ‘stranger’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘aunt’, ‘uncle’, ‘son’ and so on. To select one, based on one card and apply intuition to it is a random affair for AI.
Let’s take this reading a step further. It’s a three card reading. The first card drawn for the ‘past’ was The Emperor. The second card representing the present was the Five of Cups. The third card for the future was Death. Lets assume the client is female and wants to know about her relationship to her father. In this scenario, it’s quite possible AI could correctly identify a father figure who was emotionally authoritative in the past, is now forlorn over lost emotional opportunities in the past and in the future, this emotional relationship with the client will die a death.
There is nothing in this reading that AI cannot produce based on a vast databank of information. It is a mechanical reading, producing no insights but based solely on an algorithm that recognises the ‘Father’ figure spread across three cards. You may read these exact same cards and understand that the figure isn’t the father but the client herself, that she was very independent as a child, sad now but in the future, the ‘old’ way she emotionally manages relationships is about to die a death.
You cannot give a reason for this reading. The logical interpretation is that the father is depicted in the cards. But a sense inside you tells you this isn’t so much about the father but about the clients own emotional relationship with her father and not the father’s with the client.
AI cannot give information based on a sense. It cannot give information based on intuition. At least not yet anyway. Perhaps, some day in the future when AI has learned to come up with independent reasoning it might be able to do this but at the moment, AI is literally based on feeding in vast amounts of data and having an algorithm select the most appropriate one. It’s not even AI in its truest sense, it’s more machine processing of data and coming up with information. There is no learning beyond what is in the database. AI at the moment just does not have the capability to come up with an idea that has never been thought of before. It must exist in its database for AI to select it or predict it.
So my guess is Tarot Card Reading can go two ways;
- Tarot Readings by AI which produce a mechanical answer based on a mathematical algorithm
- Tarot Readings that genuinely rely on the intuition and sense of the reader to interpret a card in a way that does not exist in a memory bank.
Does this mean we won’t see AI being used to read cards. Absolutely not. It will become very widespread and cheap. And the choice a client will face will be based on their inherent belief about this question: Are the cards just a mechanical book that can be read and provide fixed answers or do we need to rely on spirit to guide us as we read the cards?