Culpability Quotes

“I know Charlie is right, I know I need to let those fantasies go. But I can’t help my reaction, will never escape the churn of dreams, mistakes, regrets, and terrors that is fatherhood. No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I am the stolid husband who buys two beds and two sets of sheets so his wife can get enough sleep, who trains his children to line up their shoes and put the dishes in the cabinets a certain way so their mother won’t have to rearrange things after them, who orders the messy world below so her great mind can soar like an eagle above the fray.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“When humans do something wrong, they generally face consequences. Even when our wrongdoing goes undetected by another—a parent, a spouse, an institution, law enforcement—we tend to experience guilt, shame, or regret. Only a psychopath lives life free of remorse.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“And so I told him. I told him he needed to settle with the Drummonds”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Another when the system will confront a split-second choice between striking a child on a bike and colliding with a bus full of senior citizens. And another”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“In a 1946 lecture on the problem of free will”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“In the age of Artificial Intelligence”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Because we’re in the business of improving lives and sparing lives and saving lives.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“The fleeting glimpse of normalcy makes me wonder”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I head back toward the house at a jog”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“We implicitly elect that others die rather than that our own child experience injury”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“At one point”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Nobody meaning her father”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Can I do it later”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“And there is almost no one teaching them how to be good.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“This behavior is known as anthropomorphic projection.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Like our children”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I’m writing about the accident.” “How so?” “I haven’t worked it out yet,” she says after a pause. “But there’s something I need to understand about what happened. Something about all the . . . how to put it. The connections.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Maj. RAMIREZ: Senator”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“This had always been Lorelei’s most primal fear”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“You know your wife’s an absolute superstar”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Lorelei was fortunate”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“among today’s young adults and twentysomethings. Many of our friends with grown children have shared their frustrations at this baffling phenomenon: kids refusing to get driver’s licenses”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“the great Gen Z slowdown,”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Now”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I wonder who bought this compound”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I decide not to push.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Lorelei’s heartbeats throb against my palm; also the pulse of the thing that lives among us now”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I have heard Lorelei pose the same thought experiment a dozen times over the years, to students and colleagues, to our kids around the dinner table. The drowning child scenario gives us a way to think about our obligations to those around us, Lorelei would say, to our neighbors and our loved ones, versus our obligations to the world at large, to those we will never know. It offers a moral test that most of us fail, that our culture fails. Sheltered by our money and our first world comforts, we will always ignore the suffering of other, more remote people in the face of our own children’s suffering. We implicitly elect that others die rather than that our own child experience injury, or even mild discomfort. But it’s the beginning of the sentence that stares back at me. A philosopher I know.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“to project onto them our ways of understanding the world. Yet such human-seeming systems comprise a small fraction of the AI shaping our everyday experience. Even as you read these words, there are AI systems at work all around you, with profound bearing on the disposition of your food, your money, your shelter, your safety. They manage investment portfolios, coordinate global supply chains, and keep networks secure. They direct air traffic, drive trucks and cars, detect fraud, and optimize irrigation schedules. Increasingly, they fight wars. And there is almost no one teaching them how to be good.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability