Book review: Where is AI leading us?
By Philippa Tracy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) entered the zeitgeist a while ago. And while Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability plays out as a family drama, it is essentially about the ethics of AI. There are plenty of moral dilemmas, not least who is responsible for the death of two elderly people when a driverless minivan veers out of control and kills them. This happens on a family trip to a youth tournament, before the eldest of the offspring, Charlie, goes off to college as a lacrosse player. Noah, the father, is clearly proud of Charlie and anticipates a glittering career ahead; not only is Charlie good-looking, he is the “undisputed star of his squad.” Obviously, that kind of middle-class hubris cannot go unchecked.
The story is narrated by Noah, a lawyer, with something of an inferiority complex, when comparing himself to his wife, Lorelei, an expert in AI, conducting cutting-edge research; she has won an award for her groundbreaking work on the morality of AI. (This, of course, is the point of the story.) Unlike his wife, and the rest of her family, he is no “standout”, nevertheless he seems relatively content with his family life, and the relationships seem to work. At least, that is, before the accident.
Noah seems initially to have been happy enough to travel enough around in the family’s autonomous minivan, even if unsettled at times by the “abrupt decelerations, inexplicable lane changes, uncanny twitches of the wheel.” When the accident happens, the minivan is in hands-free mode and teenager, Charlie, is behind the wheel. But there are four other people in the car, the whole family in fact. Nobody is actually driving. This raises a number of questions: What really happened that day? Who is responsible? And how to deal with survivors’ guilt.
Things start to spiral out of control when the family go to Chesapeake Bay for a few days to recuperate. Charlie falls for Eurydice, or Dissee, the daughter of the tech billionaire next door, Daniel Monet. Coincidence or not? It seems that he and Lorelei know each other too. What is the nature of their relationship? While Noah ponders the police investigation and his relationship with his son, there is the issue of the “misalignment” of their legal interests, when they decide to appoint a lawyer. Noah and Lorelei’s marriage appears to be crumbling, while Charlie and Dissee go missing. And Alice, the middle child, uses her chatbot friend to confide her secrets and deal with her own feelings about what happened. The youngest in the family, Izzy, is behaving equally bizarrely.
Once responsibility is abdicated to AI, does it make life better? Who makes the decisions? How far should we trust AI? What are the consequences of trusting our lives to machines? And what is the real impact of so-called chatbot ‘friends’? As Lorelei writes in one of her books, “Artificial Intelligence confronts us with the problem of distributed culpability.” It is an interesting read, not only on the many issues related to fathers and sons, marriages, parenting, keeping our teenagers safe and the fragility of life itself. But also about the pressing issue of AI and where it is leading us.