Orb

In 2025, over one billion people suffer from mental and addictive disorders whilst Earth has warmed more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, destabilising ecosystems and disproportionately burdening marginalised communities. AI threatens labour markets and democratic processes, and societal polarisation erodes trust in institutions. The world in 2025 is a complex matrix of crises, demanding radical, transformative approaches that go beyond traditional solutions. Psychedelics show extraordinary promise in treating anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD, and eating disorders, catalysing change not just for individuals but for entire societies, fostering empathy and reshaping our relationship to the living planet. Yet most psychedelic therapies remain trapped behind expensive clinics and luxury retreats, driven by corporate interests whilst appropriating ancestral traditions, whilst more people turn to self medication without proper guidance, increasing risks and potential for harm.

Against this backdrop, Orb reimagines psychedelic therapy as decentralised, equitable, and accessible. AI guides while humans care, ensuring wisdom, safety, and inclusion. Healing moves beyond institutions into communities, blending tradition with technology. Orb's handheld device and ergonomic, nature-inspired earphones use bone-conducting, biometric technology to monitor brain activity and vital signs, enhancing safety, comfort, and immersion. Structured preparation, harm reduction, and post-experience integration are embedded throughout. Shamans, mentors, and experts walk alongside each journey, ensuring support remains deeply personal. Orb offers affordable, peer-supported experiences tailored to each individual, while honouring Indigenous knowledge and strengthening our relationship with nature.

Yet, Orb emerges not as a product but as a provocation, a speculative artefact from a possible future that simultaneously critiques its own mechanism: the substitution of human wisdom with algorithmic responses in contexts as delicate as altered states of consciousness. AI operates here as, at best, paper over the cracks in an inaccessible mental health system, a quick fix that can never replace embodied, communal care. As society increasingly anthropomorphises these systems, assigning them trust once reserved for mentors and guides, these technologies, emerging from large companies and capitalist incentives, trend towards domains that border on the religious or cultlike, offering promises of meaning, identity, and belonging in commercial packages. As we blur the boundaries between technology and spirituality, what do we lose by entrusting our most vulnerable, transformative moments to the logic and motivations of machines? We must guard against transactional relationships with capitalist products, especially when people are at their most open and susceptible under psychedelics.

Orb raises as many questions as it answers, inviting us to imagine a world where healing reconnects us with each other, the planet, and a future that values interdependence over extraction. Can we democratise psychedelic therapy without replicating existing power structures? How do we balance innovation with Indigenous wisdom, and ensure technology amplifies rather than replaces human connection? If accessible, could psychedelics help unlock our collective psyche from our rigid cages, to challenge our perceptions of reality enough to transition us to more regenerative ways of being? If psychedelics can dissolve ego boundaries, can they also help us transcend artificial divisions of nation, race, and species to cultivate a more conscious, connected world? As psychedelics enter the mainstream, we must decide: will they serve the few or benefit the whole?