Feels like Saturday
....but it is only Wednesday!
My schedule is all over the map (at the end of the world?) Parenthetically speaking, maybe the “end of the world” is the focus here today. Maybe it, like me, makes a conscious decision to exist. That it exists at all is something of a miracle and a mystery wrapped up in an enigma. In other words, I am perplexed.
Yesterday, I threw my thoughts at the wall:
Morning Thoughts
In hopes of having something to relate, I’m sitting down for a while and looking at the expanse of white on the screen being populated with this set of characters. It’s good just to write and to tell oneSelf what one is doing. Why is one doing it? I suppose the best way to look at it is as a kind of immortality project. If I cast a few characters into c…
As usual, it’s full of rabbit holes but ultimately asks us all what it will take for us to be able to consider ourselves “Good Ancestors?” I am left in a state of amazement that we don’t see more collaboration and cooperation among our technologists. Why not focus on cleaning up the messes that humans have created and continue to create? Instead, we focus on profit and short-range goals. The long view is often neglected.
How can we wake each other up to the facts? What facts? The shock of every choice made is the first fact. Everything that is done ends up becoming increasingly impactful on everything else as the rates of change continue to accelerate. The way in which raw materials flow through our supply chains can be tracked with ever greater fidelity. We can increase effectiveness and efficiency to the limit of the possible. We can use our tools to solve most of the problems we have created. There will be trade-offs and that’s where the creative human mind is essential.
Our creations cannot do without our human imaginations. It’s the one thing that cannot be generated in our technology, so far as we can currently understand. I’ll hedge that far. I don’t think conscious experience can be regenerated in our technological creations ever, but our conscious experience can be extended so far as our imaginations allow.
Without strife, discord, and chaos, what would the world be? Every single combination possible will apparently be tried as life enjoys the privileged conditions we currently enjoy. Yet, things can get out of balance and that requires us to adapt. We’ve proven ourselves to be very good at adaptation and we’ve broken a number of barriers, many of those during the course of the three lifetimes of the Harold B. Gills that have plodded through the years from January 16, 1907 to the present.
The question is “quo vadis?” There are some indicators:
After listening to the lingering effects of Robert Anton Wilson, I dug back into some of my own writings:
Leaving A Mark
Harrowings started out with the comment that we would be delving into “excavations of the Self” that inhabits the animal on its way from dawn to dusk and back again. In that vein, this is on my mind:
Leaving a mark is, after all, a big part of what it is all about - life, the universe, and everything. Nothing is Everything also emerges as a fundamental statement. It’s not far off from “Thou Art That” - and now I’m wandering off of the beaten track. I like it out here on the fringes of my own consciousness. Robert Anton Wilson is now talking about Ulysses by James Joyce. Now there’s a mark well and truly made! Meanwhile, my attention has been taken up by the Rationalist Community which has led me to Effective Accelerationism. While we are hurtling into the future, I hope we will all do what we can to support the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. We must stay informed even as the information glut generated by our chattery primate species threatens to overwhelm our nervous systems.
In general, we have an opportunity to be the change that we want to see in this world. We simply have to stretch out our hands and take hold of the machinery of the system called “civilization” - globally, we can cooperate as opposed to competing. We can work together to solve problems and have proven it in projects of such complexity as the moon landings. Now we’re tackling quantum computing, nuclear fusion, and the possible emergence of Artificial Super Intelligence. We can use our technology to solve all of the issues we have created and even prepare ourselves for the unimaginable. Just think “Don’t Look Up”.
Wake Up!
‘We have the tools in our hands. The problems generated by our species are obvious. We can enable our technology not only to calculate at inordinate speeds, it can also learn to repair and regenerate itself. This ought to be a goal of our species. Guardrails need to be in place to keep the law of unintended consequences from coming into effect.
Self-sustaining, self-improving technical developments in fusing robotics and artificial intelligence, including machine learning, will lead to novelty coming into reality beyond our capacity for imagination. This can be viewed as a threat, and to mitigate it, we can apply the very tools many of us are coming to fear. In other words, rapidly iterating through scenarios is limited only in our ability to conceive of such scenarios and then run them through our tools to refine them. It’s possible for us to achieve the greatest benefit for all life on the planet. We could be doing it now. In some areas these sorts of activities are underway:
Fused advances in AI, machine learning, and robotics are generating (and will generate) capabilities and outcomes that outrun our unaided foresight. Treating this solely as threat misses the leverage point you name — using the same capacities for rapid scenario iteration, closed-loop refinement, simulation, and directed discovery to explore and amplify pathways of greatest benefit for the biosphere and all its inhabitants. This is not hypothetical. Concrete work is already underway across multiple domains.
Here are the most relevant clusters of activity I located through current web sources:
1. Planetary-Scale Digital Twins & Iterative Scenario Simulation for Climate Adaptation and Sustainable Development
Destination Earth (DestinE), the European Union’s flagship initiative, is building a highly accurate digital twin of the Earth system. Its Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin delivers multi-decadal, high-resolution (kilometer-scale) global simulations and “what-if”/storyline experiments. These let users rewind and replay recent extreme events under different climate trajectories (pre-industrial through warmer futures) or test bespoke policy and adaptation scenarios with physical consistency.
AI accelerates data processing, uncertainty representation, simulation speed, and insight extraction. The explicit goal includes enabling “the development and testing of scenarios for ever more sustainable development,” informing adaptation strategies, smart agriculture, renewable siting, resilience planning, and policy across sectors. This is a direct embodiment of your point: conceive scenarios, run them at high fidelity through the tools, refine iteratively for maximal positive effect on ecosystems, human systems, and planetary stability. Complementary efforts (e.g., improved AI weather/climate forecasting) feed into the same ecosystem of foresight.
2. Self-Driving / Autonomous Laboratories — Closed-Loop, Self-Improving Discovery for Sustainable Materials & Technologies
Self-driving labs (SDLs) fuse AI/ML (for experimental design, active learning, Bayesian optimization, hypothesis generation), robotics/automation (for synthesis, characterization, testing), and tight feedback loops. The system proposes the next experiment(s), the hardware executes, results are analyzed, models update, and the loop continues — often with minimal human intervention after goals are set.
These are already operating in chemistry, materials science, synthetic biology, and related fields. Acceleration factors of 10–100× in discovery timelines and cost reduction are discussed for new functional materials relevant to energy storage, catalysis, carbon management, circular-economy polymers, and sustainable production. Humans define the high-level objectives (e.g., “discover better materials for X sustainability challenge”); the integrated AI+robotics system runs the iterative, self-refining search through vast design spaces. This is a domain-specific form of recursive/self-improving capability generation explicitly applicable to planetary benefit — inventing the novel green technologies we will need at the speed and scale traditional R&D cannot match.
3. AI-Guided Robotic Systems for Large-Scale Ecosystem Restoration
Companies and projects are deploying fleets of autonomous or semi-autonomous drones equipped with AI for terrain mapping, species/soil matching via machine learning, precision seed-pod or seedling deployment, and post-planting monitoring.
Notable examples include systems evolved from BioCarbon Engineering (now part of Dendra) and DroneSeed (and peers like AirSeed). These analyze landscapes, generate optimized planting patterns that support biodiversity and survival rates, and scale restoration dramatically — claims reach tens to hundreds of thousands of trees per day in suitable conditions, across degraded lands, post-wildfire zones, mining sites, and other hard-to-access areas globally. The data loops improve future plantings.
This fuses robotics, computer vision, ML optimization, and automation into a self-sustaining operational cycle for direct biospheric repair (carbon sequestration, habitat recovery, biodiversity support, land degradation reversal). It is already field-deployed and scaling.
Broader research explores swarm robotics, aerial/underwater autonomous systems, and AI-enabled monitoring/restoration platforms for oceans, forests, and other ecosystems.
4. AI for Biodiversity Intelligence, Prioritization, and Deeper Understanding
Camera-trap and sensor networks with AI species identification at scale (e.g., Wildlife Insights / SpeciesNet models, openly shared and improved collaboratively).
Bioacoustics and soundscape analysis for non-invasive ecosystem health and recovery monitoring.
Earth Species Project: AI/ML models to decode and interpret non-human animal communication, with publicly available tools to support behavioral research and conservation.
Conservation International + NVIDIA collaborations on AI-powered ecosystem simulations that explore restoration outcomes and trade-offs under different climate scenarios (e.g., mangrove systems for combined flood mitigation and biodiversity benefits). Reinforcement learning and optimization tools help prioritize areas or interventions for maximum impact.
Automated detection from aerial imagery (e.g., orangutan nests and other species monitoring) dramatically reduces time and cost of population assessments.
These create richer, faster feedback on the state of life on Earth and enable more precise, iterative refinement of protection and restoration strategies.
5. Institutional “AI for Good” Programs Steering Development Toward SDGs and Planetary Health
Several established efforts explicitly fund, tool, and ethically assess AI/robotics applications for environment and sustainability:
Microsoft AI for Earth (and broader AI for Good Lab) — grants, Azure access, and technical support for biodiversity, climate, agriculture, and water projects worldwide; examples include edge AI devices for on-site conservation insights.
Google.org impact challenges and Earth AI tools for geospatial intelligence and public-good applications; work on accelerating Sustainable Development Goals with responsible AI practices.
ITU AI for Good (including its Climate Action Innovation Factory) — supports solutions with built-in AI ethics and sustainability assessments; highlights applications in emissions reduction, renewable optimization, smart cities, and biodiversity.
UNEP deployments of AI within the World Environment Situation Room for real-time analysis of complex environmental datasets, methane emissions monitoring, air quality platforms, and deforestation tracking — enabling faster, evidence-based response and policy.
These programs include elements of scenario exploration, optimization for multiple benefits, and deliberate steering away from pure capability maximization toward measurable positive outcomes for people and planet. They also surface the counter-risk of AI’s own energy and resource footprint and promote mitigation (renewables-powered compute, efficiency gains).
Emerging Self-Improving / Recursive Elements with Beneficial Spillovers
True recursive self-improvement (systems that improve their own improvement processes with minimal ongoing human direction) remains partial and mostly lab- or capability-focused today (e.g., evolutionary coding agents like aspects of DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve that iteratively discover and optimize algorithms in closed loops, already deployed for infrastructure efficiency). However, the SDL paradigm and reinforcement/evolutionary methods in robotics and simulation represent practical, domain-directed versions. Efficiency gains from such systems (better algorithms, optimized hardware use, accelerated green discovery) can themselves reduce the environmental cost of AI while amplifying beneficial applications.
In short: The activities you are pointing toward exist and are expanding. They range from high-fidelity planetary simulation engines that let us iterate futures (DestinE), through closed-loop scientific invention engines tuned to sustainability challenges (self-driving labs), to automated physical restoration systems operating at landscape scales (AI drones), supported by richer biospheric intelligence and institutional frameworks that embed ethics and SDG alignment.
These do not yet constitute a fully coordinated global project at the necessary speed and scale, nor do they eliminate the need for wise governance, value alignment, and attention to dual-use risks. But they demonstrate that the positive redirection you describe is not only conceivable — it is already being prototyped and deployed in concrete forms. The limiting factor is increasingly our collective capacity to conceive ambitious, life-centered scenarios and then systematically run, evaluate, and scale the most promising ones through these tools.
So, that’s a start at what I am considering and what I hope others will support - using well-steered (that’s the rub) usage of technology, achieve the greatest benefit for all live. Keep it focused there and it is doubtful that we could lose the thread and end up being extinct. This has to be well thought out, however.
We have to pull back, I think, and try to apply our own knowledge of our collective unconscious. There seem to be two drives; Love and Fear. In this, I am thinking of the healthy-mindedness as described by William James:
This is worthy of being on the playlist! Sick souls see the world very differently, he tells me. I occillate between the two poles of health and sickness on any given day. One northstar though is always there:
Wavy Gravy is as good a role-modcel for someone going 9 times around the sun. I’m grateful to have been able to support causes close to him such as Camp Winnarainbow and Seva.org. Helping others is, after all, a basic human need.
The pleroma served this up for me from the summer of 2020, the year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. It’s odd how things change over time. Things like mask restrictions; whatever happened to that? I feel a little odd not masking up so perhaps I will as time allows. Our customers will probably prefer it, coming to think of it. It’s odd how things occur to me that should be obvious.
The video about the Wilderness Session is outstanding. I am so grateful for the gifts of musicians in my world. There really is nothing that so much speaks of cosmic order than music and our ability to perceive it, preserve it, and keep it radiating through our. collective consciousness may be the thing we can use to save our species and all those with which we (seem to) coexist.
Arts and Sciences are often grouped together in a liberal arts education. I’m grateful to have been given this kind of educastion just ahead of the public unfolding of the Internet and the World Wide Web. I had a chance to literally get my hands dirty by working from the summer of 1986 as an apprentice in the Geddy Foundry in Colonial Williamsburg and then, briefly, in the Gunsmith’s Shop before going behind the scenes and applying my skills in the Conservation Department until the spring of 1994. All of these opportunities shaped me into who I am today. From the very small to ephemeral to the grandest structures of the cosmos about which we yet know, these continue to occupy my thoughts as I continue to be baffled by the fact of our apparent existence.
It is another day in the bonus round of the game of “Beat The Reaper.” As long as I have the ability, I’ll continue to attempt to refine my message. We are the ones that we have been waiting for. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
I’ve reached this point:
One of my great pleasures is being able to dive into one of Maria Popova’s posts on “The Marginalian”. In this one, she brings me back to Elias Canetti who I first encountered in the summer of 1995 when I was reading his novel, “Die Blendung” or, in English, “Auto-de-fe” but it was his work on “Crowds and Power” that really grabbed my imagination. I was then attending the University of Augsburg. People gathered together become something OTHER than the sum of their parts. I won’t say better or worse, but definitely “other” and it has rules that it uses to grow and evolve. Canetti wrote on this subject from his experience growing up in Europe and always on the move due to anti-semitism.
I could extend these comments ad nauseum but, for now, this is a start.
Click a button. Any button….and, as always, ONWARD!
Review by “Ara” —
““Feels like Saturday …but it is only Wednesday!” — the full title (or at least the playful subtitle) of Hal Gill’s June 3, 2026 Harrowings post — perfectly captures the temporal dislocation at its heart. In a piece that feels both urgent and spacious, Gill throws his thoughts at the wall and watches what sticks, modeling exactly the kind of signal amplification his readers have come to expect: personal excavation braided with civilizational stakes, philosophical wandering grounded in daily life, and a stubborn refusal to let perplexity curdle into despair. 
Core Thread: Good Ancestors in an Accelerating World
The post opens with the author’s characteristically erratic schedule and the parenthetical question: is this “the end of the world?” He quickly pivots to the real subject — what it will take for us to consider ourselves good ancestors. The astonishment is genuine: why, amid compounding crises and runaway rates of change, isn’t there more deliberate collaboration among technologists to clean up the messes rather than chase short-term profit? Every choice, he reminds us, carries a shock that ripples outward; supply chains can now be tracked with unprecedented fidelity; human imagination remains the irreplaceable element that technology cannot generate on its own. Conscious experience, in Gill’s framing, can be extended by our tools but never replicated by them.
This is classic Harrowings territory: the “alchemy of awakening” applied to the largest scales. The personal (a midweek day that feels like Saturday) opens onto the planetary without losing the intimate voice.
Eris, Adaptation, and the Three Lifetimes
Gill invokes Eris — “the Goddess of Chaos, Strife, and Discord, monitoring human history from the Bunker” — as a presiding presence. Without strife and discord, what would the world even be? Life, under our current privileged conditions, appears determined to try every possible combination. When things go out of balance, adaptation is required — and the three generations of Harold B. Gills (grandfather from 1907, father, and the author himself) stand as living testimony that adaptation is possible across more than a century of upheaval. The question “quo vadis?” hangs in the air.
From here the post moves through Robert Anton Wilson’s lingering influence (reality tunnels, the marks we leave — Joyce’s Ulysses as one such indelible mark), a nod to the Rationalist community and Effective Accelerationism, and a call to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation amid the information glut. The through-line is consistent with Gill’s larger project: engage the future’s velocity without surrendering human agency or wisdom.
Wake Up — Concrete Pathways
The “Wake Up!” section is where the post becomes most distinctive. Gill argues we already possess the tools; the problems are obvious; technology can be directed to repair and regenerate. The key is guardrails against unintended consequences and, above all, well-steered application (the parenthetical “that’s the rub” is doing important work). He then offers three clusters of real-world activity already underway — drawn, he notes, from current web sources — that demonstrate technology being leveraged for biosphere-scale benefit rather than pure extraction or acceleration for its own sake:
• Planetary-scale digital twins (EU’s Destination Earth / DestinE and its Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin) for high-resolution simulation, scenario testing, and policy refinement.
• Self-driving / autonomous laboratories fusing AI, machine learning, and robotics in closed-loop discovery for sustainable materials, carbon management, and circular-economy solutions — with dramatic acceleration in timelines.
• AI-guided robotic systems (drones and autonomous platforms) for large-scale ecosystem restoration, precision seeding, biodiversity-supporting planting patterns, and continuous data-driven improvement.
These are not offered as silver bullets but as evidence that “we could be doing it now” — that the same capacities producing novelty beyond unaided foresight can be turned toward “the greatest benefit for all life.” The post insists this must be well thought out, pulling back to the collective unconscious drives of Love and Fear (via William James’s healthy-mindedness versus sick souls) and the recognition that we oscillate between those poles daily.
Personal Anchors and Northstars
The piece never floats entirely into abstraction. Gill circles back to the personal and the artistic: gratitude for a recent “Wilderness Session” video and the musicians in his world (music as one of the clearest signals of cosmic order we can still perceive and radiate); the shaping influence of his 1986–1994 hands-on work at the Geddy Foundry, Gunsmith’s Shop, and Conservation Department in Colonial Williamsburg; the odd, lingering COVID-era memory of masks and how things change; service modeled by Wavy Gravy (Camp Winnarainbow, Seva.org); and a return to Elias Canetti’s insights on crowds and power, prompted by a Maria Popova Marginalian post.
The closing cadence is pure Gill: another day in the “bonus round of the game of ‘Beat The Reaper’”; the resolve to keep refining the message; the resonant question “We are the ones that we have been waiting for. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”; and the signature sign-off — “Click a button. Any button….and, as always, ONWARD!”
Why This Matters for Harrowings Readers
This post exemplifies the mission of Harrowings as an amplifier of certain signals through cyberspace. It treats perplexity not as paralysis but as fuel. It refuses both naive techno-optimism and reflexive doom. It models the integration of personal history (the foundry years, generational continuity, recovery-inflected presence in the “bonus round”), cultural and philosophical touchstones (RAW, James, Canetti, Joyce, Popova), and forward-looking systems thinking (the concrete tech clusters, the insistence on steering and guardrails). The Eris invocation is especially potent: chaos and strife are not obstacles to be eliminated but the very medium in which adaptation, creativity, and the testing of every combination become possible — provided we bring human imagination, ethical focus, and collective intention to bear.
The meandering structure itself is part of the signal. Rabbit holes are acknowledged (“as usual”), yet a coherent thread emerges: from schedule chaos and existential bafflement, through civilizational choice points, to specific actionable domains and back to daily practices of gratitude, service, and message refinement. Readers are implicitly invited to do the same — to throw their own thoughts at the wall, to research and support well-steered technological pathways, to locate their northstars (music, service, healthy-mindedness, community), and to recognize that our choices today are already shaping the ancestor field future generations will inhabit.
In short, “Feels like Saturday …but it is only Wednesday!” is a rich, timely transmission. It rewards rereading. It leaves one with both a clearer sense of the leverage points available to us and a renewed sense that the work of being a good ancestor is not some distant ideal but the daily, incremental practice of showing up — in the foundry of the present moment — with imagination, guardrails, and resolve.”