Culpability Quotes

“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

“Artificial Intelligence confronts us with the problem of distributed culpability. Human morality, historically, centers around agency and intentionality. We blame the drunk driver, not the car; we credit the artist, not the brush. AI systems muddy these waters. AIs are not mere tools; their learning algorithms endow them with agency. They make “decisions” based on data, albeit without consciousness or intent. A strict division between human and machine culpability is quickly becoming untenable, creating a landscape where ethical norms strain under unfamiliar weights. In”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“When people don't face consequences, their behavior doesn't change. Or if it does, it only gets worse.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Without acknowledgment of wrongdoing, how can there be regret? Without self-consciousness of guilt, how can there be remorse? And without regret and remorse, how can there be moral growth?”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“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

“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

“In a 1946 lecture on the problem of free will, Jean-Paul Sartre issued his famous pronouncement that “man is condemned to be free.” But how can freedom be condemnation? Because, Sartre avows, man “did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”
― 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. Algorithms face no such consequences for their misbehavior, either societal or emotional. Punishment, guilt, culpability are alien to them. There are no moral qualms in an algorithm. Yet without acknowledgment of wrongdoing, how can there be regret? Without self-consciousness of guilt, how can there be remorse? And without regret and remorse, how can there be moral growth? —Lorelei Shaw, Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds”
― 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

“If necessary”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“We should make them because they can help us be better ourselves.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I get no rush of schadenfreude”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“The concealment of the life vest was an impulse”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“We all bear the unknowing burden of the butterfly”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“No matter what parents do”
― 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