She Treads Softly: Culpability

Sunday, July 6, 2025

Culpability

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
7/8/25; 380 pages
Spiegel & Grau

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger is a highly recommended family and AI drama. It follows the aftermath of a family's accident in their AI controlled autonomous minivan and the implications of AI in their daily lives and has been described as a psychosocial thriller.

The Cassidy-Shaw family is on their way to a lacrosse tournament in Delaware. The father, Noah is working on a legal memo in the passenger seat; 17-year-old son, Charlie, is in the driver's seat. In the back seats are mother, Lorelei, a genius who is a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, along with daughters Alice, 13 and Izzy, 11. When their self driving mini van crashes into another car, the mini van is sent rolling while the other car catches fire and the passengers die. Noah and Charlie are unscathed while the others are all rushed to the hospital with various injuries.

The resulting police investigation seems to implicate Charlie, but every member of the family feels some culpability for the accident which unfolds during a stay at a summer rental house on the Chesapeake Bay. Each member of the family has a secret that they feel implicates them in the accident. The stay on Chesapeake Bay further complicates the plot.

Noah narrates most of the story with excerpts from both an article by Lorelei entitled “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” and Alice's conversation with an AI chatbot. What follows is a compelling realistic morality tale that explores a traumatic family event along with both the moral responsibility and the ethical consequences of AI in out everyday lives. The use of AI in various forms is present throughout the novel.

The writing is excellent and insightful in this topic-driven novel. While the the character's are sufficiently developed and face several challenges, the bigger topic is AI and our connection to devices. Noah struggles with an inferiority complex, which influences his narration of the events and his interactions with his family but he also sees them with compassion and acceptance when they admit their struggles. This would be an excellent book club selection for the myriad of discussions that could result.

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger is a great choice for anyone who would appreciate a novel following the implications of AI in our daily lives. Thanks to Spiegel & Grau for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.