The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger reminds me of nothing so much as Harvard Law Professor Michael Sandel’s course on justice and making ethical decisions, especially when choosing between two, equally problematic alternatives.  Holsinger’s novel is set in the era of artificial intelligence. Attorney Noah Cassidy and his wife, Lorelei Shaw, a prominent leader in the field of A.I. (and MacArthur grant winner) are in their autonomous van with their family. Seventeen-year-old son Charlie is behind the wheel, next to dad, who is working on his laptop. Mother (also writing away) and two younger sisters are behind. The car collides with a Honda Accord coming from the opposite direction, killing an elderly couple inside. Who is responsible? The driver of the oncoming car? Charlie, who was behind the wheel? Father Noah, for not paying attention to what Charlie is doing? Or the self-driving car itself?

As Lorelei herself has written, an algorithm “may think for us, it may work for us, it may organize our lives for us. But the algorithm will never bleed for us. The algorithm will never suffer for us. The algorithm will never mourn for us.”  And, the story reminds us, it will never make decisions based on ethics or moral responsibility.

The police investigate, doing so-called digital vehicle forensics (DVF), reading the data underlying the van’s navigation system. The tension builds.  The family has a one-week rental of a house by a lake.  The lakeside neighbor, in a resplendent estate complete with a helicopter and abundant security personnel, turns out to be the CEO of a major tech firm doing cutting edge AI. Charlie gets involved with the CEO’s daughter. There are hints of previous connections between Lorelei and the CEO. The infatuated teenagers do impetuous teenager things.

The story could read like a daytime soap: a posh party of wealthy bigwigs on the CEO’s estate, the looming presence of a police investigator, the warnings of lawyers, key characters who go missing, suspicions of an affair. But throughout, author Holsinger weaves gnawing questions of ethical import.

The adults in this novel grapple with the uncomfortable awareness that this A.I. technology created by human beings with so much capacity to do good can also potentially deliver evil effects.  On a large scale, drones that save American soldiers’ lives (“declining combatant death ratio”) can also launch lethal strikes killing innocent civilians, half of them children. Auto-driving cars can move vehicles more efficiently but go out of control and kill. AI can speed up the development of drugs that save lives.  Drug gangs use pattern recognition to avoid law enforcement vehicles.

Holsinger gives the reader a riveting narrative while articulating the moral dilemmas that arise when decisions are made by data, without consciousness or informed by human values. He’s a good storyteller and never strikes the reader as being preachy. At the end, we’re forced to recognize that, with A.I. taking over more and more human activities, our futures become less and less predictable. Our technological anxieties are woven into the fabric of our daily lives. As if we didn’t have enough other developments to worry about!