The answers we leave behind

Where I started

My last piece, Not on the same day, not at the same hour, ended like this: “I’ll walk my road. It’s up to them to build their own on top of it.”

I stopped at that line.

I’ve long thought of life as a road, and of each of us as setting out from footprints someone else left. And for the person who lives it, a life ends in a full stop. So the question waiting for me was this:

What kind of question do I hope my own full stop will become for whoever comes next?

With that question in hand, I looked at two places where one person’s full stop became someone else’s starting point.

A story told again

This summer I saw Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem.

It is a story someone left behind a very long time ago. It has been handed down ever since, and now someone has picked it up and told it in their own way. A story gets carried forward, someone tells it differently, and a new road is built on top of the old one.

People keep coming back to stories like this, whatever the century. My own explanation is simple: people are drawn to goodness.

An answer that became a question

Newton saw an apple fall.

That story is a recollection. Newton told it when he was old, and people around him wrote it down. William Stukeley recorded that in the spring of 1726 he took tea with Newton under some apple trees, and that Newton said the idea of gravity had first come to him in just such a setting. The question on his mind, as Stukeley tells it, was why the apple should fall straight down to the ground.

Newton answered it: bodies pull on one another. That became his law of universal gravitation.

But the answer left a small gap. Mercury’s orbit slowly swings round the Sun, and when astronomers worked it out with Newton’s theory, a little of that swing was left over. In 1859 the astronomer Le Verrier pointed out the mismatch in a letter published by the French Academy of Sciences. He suspected some unknown influence was at work, but declined to say which explanation was right.

In November 1915 Einstein used his new general theory of relativity to calculate that leftover. It could be explained, he wrote, without any special extra assumption.

The physicists who came after Newton didn’t throw his answer away. They asked again how far it held, and what it couldn’t explain.

For Newton, his life and his answer ended in a full stop. Those who came after didn’t rub it out; they put a question mark beside it. That, at least, is how I read it.

Masters, parents, generations

Great minds have produced great minds, parents have raised children, and each generation has handed on to the next. Just as Einstein’s question grew out of Newton’s answer, children take what their parents leave them and start their own road from there.

Our generation is making something to hand on, too. I see it in the way people and AI are starting to work together at many stages of production.

Writing I thought I was saving for my own pension made me think about a different route from simply adding more workers: what if each person could produce more? I see that possibility beginning with today’s AI. But producing more doesn’t automatically put more into wages and pensions. I followed that question in Who gets the extra €100?

How far must we go to meet that responsibility?

If we know that our full stop will be where the next generation starts, then the responsibility already exists. That’s my view.

So my question isn’t whether we’re responsible. It’s what we need to look out for, and to build, while we’re putting down that full stop — and how far that has to go.

Where I stand now

An old story has been carried forward and told again, and Newton’s full stop gained a question mark beside it. Having followed both, this is where I’ve got to:

For the person who lives it, a life ends in a full stop. But people hope it won’t be only an ending: that someone will put a question mark beside it and set off again from there.

I expect the answers we build with AI will become questions for the next generation too. And I think learning to live in harmony with AI will matter more to the generations after us.

I’m not going to say how far our responsibility should go. What full stop I’ll leave, and how carefully I should put it down: for now, that’s the question I’m carrying.

Looking back

An early outline read my phrase about philosophy beginning with God as the medieval line of theology. What I meant was the questions about people that live on in the old myths
The draft tried to talk about how well The Odyssey did at the box office. What I meant was that stories get carried forward and told differently
The draft ended by saying that people don’t end their lives with a full stop. What I meant was closer to the opposite: a life does end in a full stop for the person who lived it, but we hope it won’t be only an ending
The draft said that while writing about pensions I saw them shifting away from depending on the number of workers. That piece didn’t show any such shift. It made me think about a different route
At first I wanted a long list of names, from Galileo to today’s physicists. I kept one place where an answer turned into a question: Newton, then Einstein

What I checked, and what I couldn’t

Checked

The Odyssey — a 2026 US film directed by Christopher Nolan, adapted from Homer’s epic poem
Newton’s apple — in a manuscript written in 1752, William Stukeley recorded that on 15 April 1726 he took tea with Newton under apple trees and heard the story. The question Newton recalled was why the apple fell straight down to the ground. John Conduitt’s manuscript (about 1727–28) and Voltaire’s essay (printed in 1727) also tell the apple story. None of the three says the apple hit him on the head
Mercury — in 1859 Le Verrier wrote, in a letter published by the French Academy of Sciences, that the motion of Mercury’s perihelion (the point of its orbit closest to the Sun) showed an excess that Newton’s theory didn’t account for. He also wrote that he had no intention of deciding between the possible explanations
General relativity — at a session of the Prussian Academy of Sciences on 18 November 1915, Einstein presented his explanation of that excess, which needed no special assumption

Couldn’t check

That people return to old stories because they are drawn to goodness. That’s my own view.
When and how the apple episode actually happened. All three accounts are other people’s records of what an elderly Newton remembered
That working with AI can let each person produce enough to help support the next generation. That’s my own view. Whether the extra output reaches wages, taxes and pensions isn’t measured again here

What this piece does not claim

How far our responsibility should go
That goodness is the whole reason people return to old stories
That AI raises productivity, or that it doesn’t
That the film adapts Homer well, or badly
That Newton’s theory was wrong