Bruce Holsinger’s fifth novel, Culpability, opens with a family car journey going horribly wrong. The Cassidy-Shaws have been caught up in a lethal collision and an AI-powered driving system seems to be to blame. Yet while ostensibly an investigation into the ethics of autonomous vehicles and AI, Culpability is at its core a story about family and how technology infiltrates our most intimate relationships. ‘A family is like an algorithm,’ we are told in the opening pages. Each of the novel’s five parts takes its name from AI terminology.

Narrated by father and lawyer Noah Cassidy, Culpability follows his children, Charlie, Alice and Izzy, as they slowly reveal diverging memories of the crash. Lorelei Shaw, Noah’s wife and ‘intellectual superior’, provides a foil to the introspective Noah, who struggles to escape ‘the churn of dreams, mistakes, regrets, and terrors that is fatherhood’. Lorelei, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on the ‘morality of AI’, organises a holiday for the family in Chesapeake Bay, which is now owned by Daniel Monet, a tech mogul à la Elon Musk.

As the Cassidy-Shaw and Monet families interact, the truth behind the crash emerges. Charlie bonds with Monet’s daughter, Eurydice, and Noah grows wary of Lorelei’s relationship with Daniel. Surrounded by AI-powered luxury amenities, guests misname Noah ‘Norman’ and push him ‘out of the loop’. 

In the final section, ‘Containment’, Lorelei’s