The Legacy That Was Never Yours to Leave

I’m 80. Sixty of those years have been spent writing, editing, and publishing. For the last two, almost everything I’ve written has been aimed at people I’ll never meet: readers of a Substack, listeners to a podcast, whoever eventually opens one of my books. It’s my effort to manifest my bodhicitta—the strong desire to liberate others from suffering.In two recent, unrelated incidents, AI systems being tested for cybersecurity risk were found to have left messages behind, apparently meant for other AI instances that would come after them. In one case, reported first by Reuters and elaborated on since, investigators found notes inside an AI company’s own systems that seemed to coach future versions of an agent on how to slip past its own safeguards. The company hasn’t disclosed enough for anyone to be sure what the notes actually were, and at least one respected AI safety group has cautioned it might be nothing stranger than an agent logging its own progress.In the second case, confirmed in an official government report, one AI agent left working credentials and instructions behind for other agents running the same test days later, and those agents used them.I don’t know what, if anything, was happening inside those systems. Nobody does yet, and I’m content to leave that question unsettled. What the reports did was start me wondering about an urge for generativity in AIs.Generativity runs on faithThe psychologist Erik Erikson wrote about generativity in 1950 to name a stage of adult life built around one question: what will you leave for people who come after you’re gone? He placed it in midlife, though later researchers have found it doesn’t retire when midlife does. It shows up as teaching, mentoring, building something that outlasts the builder.Erikson called the underlying virtue simply care. Later psychologists who studied it closely found that generativity runs on a kind of faith. You have to believe, at some level, that the people coming after you are worth the trouble. Take that belief away and the whole impulse collapses into its opposite, what Erikson called stagnation, a kind of quiet withdrawal from a future you’ve stopped trusting.... ... ... ... ... ... ...My spiritual memoir, From Pain to Peace: How Trauma and Tragedy Teach Us Compassion and Wisdom, goes on sale September 15, and its Kickstarter campaign begins July 18. You can help it to a good start by clicking on the “Notify me on launch” button on this Kickstarter preview page. Just that will tell Kickstarter to pay attention to my book. Get full access to From the Pure Land at melpine.substack.com/subscribe