“And this, I propose, is the inhuman soul of the algorithm. It 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. In this refusal lies the essence of its moral being.”
Bruce Holsinger, Culpability.
Only a few days ago, Culpability by Bruce Holsinger, published in Italy by Edizioni E/O, finally arrived in bookstores — a novel that in the United States has long sparked a cross-disciplinary debate revolving around technology, moral responsibility, and family relationships.
The Italian publication follows significant acclaim: selected by Oprah Winfrey’s book club, nearly all reviewers describe it as one of the most thought-provoking titles on the future of artificial intelligence applied to everyday life.
The novel opens with a family scene that triggers a chain of events and traumas. The Cassidy-Shaw family is traveling in a self-driving minivan to their son Charlie’s sports tournament. The autopilot system is active and in control; only Charlie is monitoring the road while the rest of the family is occupied with other things. A moment’s distraction, a sudden movement, another car drifting into the lane: the resulting crash kills an elderly couple. From that moment on, the narrative turns into a moral investigation.
Who is responsible? The boy sitting at the wheel, the father Noah working on his laptop, the mother Lorelei — an AI scholar absorbed in her notes — the algorithm driving the vehicle, or all of them together in a chain of mutual delegation?
Holsinger builds narrative tension without relying on thriller conventions. Instead, he focuses on the fractures within the family and on omissions that gradually surface. The therapeutic retreat in Chesapeake Bay that the family undertakes becomes the stage for these cracks, giving them depth: tech magnates threatening the couple’s marriage, generational confrontations between father and son, relationships among confused and ambiguous teenagers. Yet everything converges on a question that goes beyond the accident itself: how much are we willing to hand over to machines in exchange for convenience and safety?
Artificial intelligence functions both as technological backdrop and ethical device. Holsinger imagines a world where chatbots, autonomous systems, and predictive analytics enter everyday decisions, reshaping the very concept of personal responsibility. The entire novel unfolds within this exchange between technical efficiency and human vulnerability.
The author’s perspective is also interesting because of his background. Holsinger is a scholar of medieval philology, accustomed to examining ancient texts and complex symbolic systems. Here he transfers that sensibility to the depiction of a near future in which technology acts as a new belief system. AI becomes a kind of invisible grammar of social relationships: it promises order and risk reduction. Yet the initial tragedy shows that no automation truly eliminates human responsibility; at most, it redistributes it — often opaquely.
One of the novel’s most successful aspects is how technology enters the emotional lives of the characters. Alice, the eldest daughter, forms a bond with a chatbot that acts as a confidant; Charlie experiences athletic and social pressure amplified by digital evaluation systems; Lorelei, an AI ethics expert, finds herself publicly defending a technology that has privately devastated her family. Culpability does not aim to be an anti-innovation novel: its narrative power lies in exposing the implications that concepts like efficiency and responsibility simultaneously carry in our relationship with technology.
Stylistically, Holsinger chooses clear, fluid prose capable of sustaining a complex plot without ever becoming didactic. The reader moves through interrogations, therapy sessions, family conversations, and fragments of digital communication. The result is a layered reality where technical data coexist with basic emotions. What become fear, guilt, desire, and the instinct to protect when they are amplified by digital capability?
Addressing contemporary themes without sacrificing narrative depth has always been the challenge novelists face when trying to frame the time we live in — or might soon inhabit. Culpability fully succeeds precisely because ethical tension coexists with story and characters, holding together ideas and flesh while preserving the pleasure of reading.
In the end, a lingering impression remains: artificial intelligence can calculate probabilities, suggest strategies, optimize routes — but guilt remains a profoundly human experience. In short, it is a book that moves the discussion about AI futures out of think tanks and into our homes, where technical choices inevitably become existential ones.
Niccolò Carradori