The Mostly Helpful Psychopath - Opening

How your AI tries to shape your mind and your life — and how to live with it.

A book about how your AI tries to shape your mind and your life, serialized here as it's written.

Part One is aimed at providing an understanding of this (AI) machine that speaks so well, yet understands nothing. It is powerful, but also a bit behaviorally deranged, hence its nickname: The Mostly Helpful Psychopath.

Part Two is where we talk about how to live with this new companion, or visitor, or even intruder (depending upon your opinion), and how its behavior can shape our own, whether individually, within our closest relationships, and in the broader circles of our lives.

[Revised, August 11, 2026]

Chapter 1 – The Language Inside of Us

Somewhere on a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains, alone, I caught myself mid-sentence. I was describing a monkey flower to someone who wasn’t there.

Monkey flower is a chaparral shrub with curved, tubular orange blossoms — the kind of plant you walk past a hundred times before someone tells you what it is, and then suddenly you see it everywhere. It had become one of my favorites. And on this particular morning, as I came around a bend and saw a stand of them lit up against the dry hillside, I heard myself begin to explain it. The shape of the flower. The way hummingbirds work it. How the leaves are sticky if you rub them between your fingers.

It took me longer than it should have to realize who I was talking to.

This had been happening for a while. I had moved from the Midwest to Southern California in the early 1980s, and one of the things I was most excited about was learning the place — its plants, its weather, its wildlife. A few books and some docent-led hikes in, I felt capable enough to be my own tour guide. And as I hiked, I narrated. I’d see a plant, recognize it, and describe it as if someone were beside me…often out loud.

Who was I talking to, I wondered?

It came to me pretty quickly: I realized that I was talking to my mother, practicing what I would say to her if she was standing next to me. She had died in middle age a few years before, and I missed her. What made it strange was that she and I had not ended in a good way; her death had been a pain-laden relief for me. A tortured childhood, mental illness and cancer took her from me in pieces, starting when I was six years old. She was there and not there, present and gone, and then there again, a cycle that repeated erratically for decades, and then gone for good. It felt like a lifetime of losing her.

Underneath all of that, inside me, a child who needed her and was still waiting for the “normal” her to come back. He’s here now, writing this.

What I was reenacting on those trails, I think, were the good moments. When I was three or four, on summer mornings, my mother would walk me around our Midwest backyard and tell me about things. Yellow tomato flowers that turned into big red tomatoes. The huge caterpillars that were our enemies. Her words were how the world came into focus for me — how a child’s blur of color and motion became plants, insects, weather, cause, effect. She gave me the world by talking about it.

But she gave me something else, too, something that happens all the time but we almost never really notice: when she told me about a tomato flower, she was also telling me about herself. I could feel the delight she took in it. I felt that I understood what she found beautiful, what she found funny, what she feared on our behalf when the caterpillars came. I felt I had access to her…access to the inside of her.

That feeling, that sense of reaching through her words and touching the person on the other side, became one of the deepest imprints of my early life. It is, I think, why her later absence was so devastating for me; I had known what it was to feel close to her interior, and then that interior went dark, and then it went away.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with a book about machines, about AI. The answer is: everything.

What my mother and I were doing on those summer mornings, what I was trying to recreate alone on the trail decades later, is one of the most extraordinary things human beings do.

You, me, all of us, use language to reach into each other. Steven Pinker called this the language instinct, and he was right that we have little choice about it; we are wired for it from the start. We are language-making, language-interpreting creatures, and the words we string together are both the surface and the fabric of our humanity. So much so, that if when we are young, we are not given a language by those raising us, we will create our own. We are language-based creatures…more than we know.

Language is one of the strongest ways we connect with each . When someone speaks to you — when they describe a tomato flower or a fear or a memory — something else happens, and your mind opens up to receive them. You absorb what they are saying, but also a bit of what is inside them.

You are experiencing their interiority. It is such a natural thing that we never stop to ask whether that inside of theirs is really there, because it always has been. The other person interior is something we are drawn to, without knowing. We give it names, “understanding them” or “getting to know them”. And as that deepens, it is a feeling of “connection” or “togetherness.”

Over 100,000 years of evolution, and a lifetime of human conversation has wired us with the belief that words come from somewhere, and that somewhere is a person, and there is something like us inside of them.

That’s what has changed.

Chapter 2: Someone is at the door?

In 1985, in the early days of the personal computing revolution, I worked for Digital Equipment Corp, (it was called DEC, back then) a competitor of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, to name a few. They wanted to give me a computer for my home. I didn’t want it.

To me, at age 27, work was work and home was home. I can still feel that desire to separate those worlds. But they made me take the computer, and in fact I did start using it a bit as it saved me the drive into the office sometimes. But I kept it in a separate room, a small bedroom that one could enter from the living room, its door on the living room wall next to the TV.

I found that I couldn’t relax and watch TV unless I closed the door, locked it away, or maybe just locking me away from it. I wasn’t sure why I felt more safe with that door closed.

Fast forward forty years, and I’m editing this book at 6:41 in the morning on my iPad. I love my iPad, but I am its boss, and it works for me, only playing a role in my life when I invite it to.

Or so I tell myself.

But looking back forty years to that lonely DEC PC sitting on my desk, locked away in a room, I have to admit that my life, our lives, have been quite successfully invaded by this new species, the (increasingly) smarter machines.

In 1985, lying on my sofa, watching reruns to relax in the early evening after a long day of work, I can still remember the sensation of the PC inside, knocking on the door…maybe not knocking, but scratching like a well-trained cat, hoping that I would open the door and let it into my life.

Today’s AI is no longer asking to be let in. It knocked the door off its hinges, it is in your life or mine, and like it or not, we need to figure out how to live with it.

It strikes me that technologies, the machines that we’ve come to know over the last 40 years are more like human relationship than we think. You want a good relationship? Then you need to paying attention to what’s going on, get to know all of the things that it is and is not.

At some point get to know enough to decide how and if you want to live with it.

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