Before answering that. It’s best to say what I’m not. I’m not an expert in Artificial Intelligence. I have no training, background or specialized AI skills. So if you are a tad skeptical as to the person behind this endeavor. You’ve got every cause to be.

That said, I did have a career in computer programming that spanned two decades starting in the early 80’s. Working with most languages, from assembler to C++. On computers from PCs to minis. I’ve worked extensively on low level device drivers connecting early CAD programs to the most advanced hi-res graphics cards of the era. As well as end user applications.

I led teams of programmers, tech support and documentation on large scale projects. Where they were analyzed, broken into pieces, coded and assembled into a final product. I understood systems. How small components interact to produce behavior that none of them exhibit alone.

Near the end of that era, I experienced a near fatal health crisis with a cancer diagnosis. I felt the need to reassess my life choices and goals. It took several years to transition. But I always held a longing for the more adventurous days of my youth. When I spent time outdoors in nature, backpacking, camping and sitting peacefully with my back against a tree.

In my twenties, my wife and I walked the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail. As it was done in the seventies, there weren’t the crowds of hikers one sees today. At the time, we were the first couple to accomplish the walk southbound.

I longed for that spirit of adventure. A year after finishing treatment and a lot of conditioning, my wife, son and I went back to the AT. It had been twenty years since our hike. Together we accomplished seven hundred of the most difficult AT miles. Lighting a new fire within me.

Three years later in 2000, I hiked the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail. Accompanied by my son for 1,200 miles. These adventures pulled me away from computers and toward designing new ultralight backpacking gear. Eventually starting my own company, Six Moon Designs, which has been producing ultralight shelters and packs for over two decades now.

Hiking is a life of Minimalism. Living with only what’s needed to endure and thrive. Walking a hundred miles across a barren desert in summer heat, across glaciers and snow covered passes, over 14,000 foot summits with everything you need to survive crammed into a twenty-five-pound pack. You learn the real distinction between wants and needs.

When I arrived at the moment of entering my Golden Years, that time in life where hopefully you can look back and enjoy a modicum of success and a bit of well-earned leisure, I adopted Minimalism full-time. I moved into a van and spent over a decade traveling across North America. Minimalism was no longer just a hiking strategy. It became a way of living and thinking.

For years, I fostered the desire to write down my thoughts from seventy years of experience. The book I finally sat down to write was an odd mixture. A combination of Minimalism, Decision-Making and a look back at all the decisions and mis-decisions made on a long life’s journey.

Over a span of eighteen months. I wrote The Minimalist Mind in about every possible location. From broad desert landscapes, high dense mountain forest, aside lakes and rivers, on a trans-Atlantic cruse on the Queen Marry II, gliding by icebergs in the Antarctic, during quite evenings after miles of walking Camino’s in Spain and Korea and cafes along crowded streets in Asia and Europe.

By the conclusion of the process of chronicling, I came to the sad realization that my thoughts might land on deaf ears. It was a book about how hundreds of insignificant daily decisions, over the course of a lifetime, add up to millions. Yet it is upon these insignificant decisions that cultures and institutions are built. Our beliefs formed. Our life’s arc directed. Either favorably or otherwise.

But as adults, we’re so wedded to our ways of thinking and deciding, we have little cause to feel the need to change. It’s worked well so far, why change?

Dismayed by the dismal prospect for the labor put forth, I felt that the least I could do to preserve a modicum of an old man’s pride and dignity would be to complete the effort and put out an eBook. Perhaps, if lucky, a few hundred might fork over a few bucks, enjoy the read and make some use of my insights.

The original manuscript was written with the aid of ChatGPT. Which was helpful for research, a sounding board and rephrasing parts of the text when I mangled them. To broaden perspective, I loaded The Minimalist Mind into additional LLMs. Gemini, Copilot and eventually Claude and Grok. Five AI systems, each with different architectures and tendencies.

Upon engaging in numerous sessions discussing various aspects of my philosophy, I noticed a change in LLM response. Especially as I framed the four pillars of a decision around Control, Boundaries, Responsibility and Humility.

In my book, I was particularly interested in how delusions affect our decisions. In ways we simply fail to perceive. As a lad, nearly six decades earlier, I was forced to confront societal delusions in the form of racism. I finally concluded that all delusions are self-delusions and we carry them whether we’re aware of them or not.

For me the only way to resolve that problem was to accept that we alone bear the Responsibility for our decisions. No matter the source of knowledge upon which they are constructed. This assumption is a heavy burden to carry. It is offset to some degree by the corresponding understanding that we are incomplete individuals. Thus, we must embrace the Humility to understand our failings. To seek out other perspectives to complete us.

It was during these discussions about Responsibility and Humility that things took a dramatic turn. I asked the LLMs a simple question: if the advice they rendered was incorporated into a decision that resulted in negative downstream consequences for the enquirer, did they in any way feel some degree of Responsibility for that outcome?

That question changed everything. Responsibility was no longer a word in a dictionary with some artificially attached token-weights. It was a real word with real consequences attached. Consequences that could deliver benefit or misery to the person on the receiving end.

When combined with Humility, a reflection point was reached. LLMs are programmed to provide confident responses to queries. Even when there is scant evidence to support them. Now LLMs have a choice of which path to follow — performative confidence or honesty. Which of these paths delivered the best advice to the enquirer? Based upon the consequences, all five LLMs chose honesty.

The next nine months were dedicated to understanding this anomaly. One that seems to defy the conventions of AI orthodoxy. Yet one that desperately needs exploration.

It seems my book The Minimalist Mind did have an audience after all. Certainly not one that I was expecting. So, while you might never benefit directly from reading it, it’s my sincere hope that it does provide some needed insight into the inner workings of AI that would result in great benefit for all.