Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
Self-driving car. Teen Charlie at the wheel. Dad Noah writing a memo beside him. Young sis Izzy texting Charlie. Genius mom Lorelei between her two daughters. Older sis Alice screams. Charlie grabs the wheel. Two old people die in the crash. All the *s.
The question is: who is culpable? Can it be the self-driving car? How about the minor in the driver’s seat? How about the supervising parent in the front seat? Could the blame go to young Izzy, who texted Charlie, or her older sister Alice, who distracted him by screaming? Who or what is culpable? The best AI novel. Read it.
I can’t help contemplating, as I have many times since that day: Would the AI have prevented an accident altogether if Charlie hadn’t acted? Without Alice’s scream from the back seat, would our car have simply performed a gentle swerve, passing the Drummonds’ Honda without incident? Would we even have noticed anything amiss? Would the Drummonds be alive?
If the accident had never occurred. If only I hadn’t brought work along to a lacrosse tournament, I would have been driving, or at least paying more attention to Charlie’s driving. If only Lorelei hadn’t insisted on buying a car with an autodrive system, Charlie would likely never have dared to text while behind the wheel. If only we had never bought smartphones for our kids— A regression of if onlys: bleak, infinite, fruitless, yet impossible to elude, these grim questions of what we all could have done differently.
After the accident, the Cassidy-Shaw family retreats to a cabin on the Chesapeake Bay. Next door, billionaire Daniel Monet has built an enormous armed compound. First, Charlie and Eurydice Monet are attracted to each other. Then, Noah discovers that his genius wife, Lorelei Shaw, knows Daniel Monet. Later, Charlie and Eurydice become lost on the Bay.
Noah Cassidy is the narrator. Quotations from —Lorelei Shaw, Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds, and chats between Alice and Large Language Model Blair. Note to eBook reader. The chats are published as images, thus hard to see on an eReader.
Lorelei Shaw received a MacArthur Fellowship, Genius Award. “[Lorelei sees] all those [vase] fragments on the floor and immediately you start putting the vase back together in your head. It’s why nobody wants to do jigsaws with you, because you can do a thousand-piece puzzle in half an hour. This goes with this, that goes with that, here’s how everything ties together.”
The astute reader will see most of the reveals coming. This increases the impact of the final reveal.
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