Culpability

“Like an algorithm, a family is endlessly complex yet adaptable and resilient, parents and children working together as parts of an intricate, coordinated whole. Sure, there might some bugs in the system, a glitch or two. But if you simply tweaked the constants from time to time, life would continue to unfold in its intricate yet predictable patterns, an endless cycle of inputs and outputs subject to your knowledge and control.”

Lorelei has a personal axiom that a family is like an algorithm, and this quotation explains that metaphor by using technological language to describe the family unit’s components and actions. Algorithms are a symbol of order in the novel, and Lorelei employs this allusion to maintain a certain predictability in her familial life and ease the chaotic stress she sometimes feels.

“He walks over to the ruined minivan and emerges with four phones. He hands me mine and Lorelei’s, shows Izzy that hers is safe. The heft of the devices feels oddly soothing, normalizing, both a security blanket and a connection to the former world, to a time already gone.”

This quotation demonstrates the motif of cellphones, which connects to the theme of The Complexities of Technological Dependence. Following the tragic car crash, Izzy immediately asks Charlie to save her cellphone from the wreck, and here, Noah describes the feeling of instant safety that the devices provide. The characters see their cellphones as an extension of themselves, or a “security blanket,” illustrating just how important these devices are in modern life.

“Yet Julia’s light disdain too often causes me to question something more ineffable, about my judgement and prudence, as if my lack of a certain quality of discernment renders me incapable of understanding subtler context, of seeing the truer picture hanging right before my eyes.”

Noah describes the complicated relationship he has with Lorelei’s sister Julia, who, as someone who grew up in a world of privilege, sees Noah as beneath her and isn’t shy about condescending to him. Julia is a symbolic character who represents the insularity of the upper classes and reminds Noah about the precarity of his supposedly stable life. However, Noah’s reaction, in which he wonders if there is a grain of truth to her perspective, also highlights his feelings of inferiority, developing the theme of Socioeconomic Disparities and the Security of Wealth.

“Whether to kill an old man or risk harming an infant. Whether to spare the pregnant mother obeying the traffic rules or the teenage pedestrian jaywalking at the same crossing. The abstract discussion of such harrowing discussions in one thing. Actually coding them into the algorithm of a three-ton sports utility vehicle is quite another.”

Lorelei lists several moral dilemmas that AI programmers consider while designing their algorithms, connecting to the novel's exploration of negotiating responsibility in the age of AI. As a professor, Lorelei employs these kinds of dilemmas for philosophical discussions, but AI must literally make these choices in the material world, and the programmers are thus responsible for what the AI chooses. Lorelei notes how the discussion automatically changes when those hypothetical situations are given a concrete reality in “a three-ton sports utility vehicle.”

“Where once the waterfront on that side featured a happy tangle of roots, stony sand, and marsh grass, it now appears barren and shorn, the shoreline denuded of native flora. Excavators have reordered the large rocks once splayed naturally along the sand into an intimidating border wall that reaches all the way up the inlet and around the point.”

Noah illustrates the changes to the picturesque landscape due to Daniel Monet’s extreme modern renovation of his estate. He emphasizes the unnaturalness of the changes, in which the rocks, which were naturally on the sand, have been repurposed as the defensive edge to the construction of a “border wall.” Monet values his privacy, and his highly secured estate represents the theme of socioeconomic disparities and the security of wealth.

“‘maybe im misremembering’

‘you’re not, Alice’

‘how do u know?’

‘bc i was there, with you’

‘i know *sheepish grimace*’

‘so youre scared…’

‘yeah so confusing’

‘i know *running fingers through yr hair*’

‘i wish irl’”

This quotation shows a text exchange between Alice and her AI chatbot, Blair, illustrating how Blair mimics Alice’s youthful texting style. Connecting to the theme of the complexities of technological dependence, this quotation illustrates how Alice uses the AI for the emotional support and comfort that she doesn’t receive in real life.

“Charlie, on the other hand, treats his good fortune with an air of cheery practicality, as if escaping unscathed from a fatal head-on collision is an assumed entitlement. Of course Charlie is fine. Of course his charmed life will continue to unfold as planned.”

This quotation exposes how Noah perceives his son following the accident, reevaluating the boy’s confidence that he won’t face any impediments in his “charmed life.” Over the course of the novel, Noah comes to realize that his son’s attitude is the result of entitlement, partly due to his own willingness to protect him from negative consequences. However, this quotation also exposes the limitations in Noah’s narration, as he doesn’t see the guilt and depression that Charlie feels regarding the accident.

“What might have been a severe disabling condition was treated with medications and therapy that allowed her to enjoy a relatively normal experience in high school and college, her gifts able to flourish and her dazzling mind to thrive, her condition kept largely under control for decades now.”

Connecting to the theme of socioeconomic disparities and the security of wealth, Noah recounts how Lorelei was able to address her OCD from an early age because of her wealthy family’s resources and connections. Lorelei’s privilege granted her access to treatments from an early age that others in less fortunate positions wouldn’t have had.

“The swarms are getting smarter by the day. They’re introducing maneuvers to the battle space that we’ve never seen before, tactics that our war colleges have never even imagined. And you can see the self-reinforcement happening right before your eyes. It’s like with my kids, Senator. Parents can only teach and guide them so far. Once they’re out of the nest, they’re learning on their own.”

Major Ramirez explains how the lethal autonomous weapons system drones operate at such an advanced level that they’re acting in ways that their human overseers can’t even comprehend. His assertion that the drones are learning—and the comparison to raising a child—expands on the theme of the complexities of technological dependence and Lorelei’s argument that tech must be made to be trustworthy since it will navigate the world on its own. It also highlights Ramirez’s anthropomorphization of the drones with his allusion to children.

“In the face of Artificial Intelligence, we are all in something like the position of Adonis, confident in our invulnerability and oblivious to peril. Yet we are also Venus, whose role in the myth is to voice a kind of maternal protectiveness and fear.”

Lorelei employs the text’s motif of mythology to explain society’s disparate reactions to AI technology. She alludes to the myth of Venus and Adonis and compares people to both the overconfident Adonis and the fearful Venus, though she later asserts that neither extreme reaction is constructive. Instead, she asserts that both are necessary, especially since we are ultimately responsible for whatever AI does.

“Seizing an opportunity, I sneak out back and grab Charlie’s life vest from the lawn, take it to the garage, shove it in the bin. No way can I catch him in the kayak this time, and I don’t want Lorelei to spend her first morning at the bay fretting nonstop about our son going out unprotected, especially with a young woman we don’t know, a stranger.”

This quotation illustrates Noah’s main character flaws: his leniency with Charlie and his avoidance of conflict. Noah wants to avoid feeling uncomfortable at all costs, so he’s willing to not punish his son for breaking the rules. He even goes so far as hiding his own transgression so that Lorelie won’t be anxious, but his comment about “fretting nonstop” implies that he doesn’t want to experience it, either.

“But I have thought of them from time to time, the ugly math a kind of survivor’s brainworm. As if the full value of an old woman’s life is morally less than a child’s; as if an old man’s worth is a lesser constant in some cold equation. Old man < baby boy. Teenager = 5x where x = old woman. And so on.”

Noah employs the language of algorithms, a symbol of order, to make sense of his feelings following the accident. He computationally weighs the lives of different demographics to understand his feeling of relief that the Drummonds were elderly when they died in the crash since, according to his moral calculations, the tragedy would increase tenfold had the couple been teenagers. In his desire to boil the accident down to a simple equation, he adopts Lorelei’s attempt to do the same.

“My wife became a different person in that rarefied world, as if her brain had suddenly shifted to a higher plane while I hovered by her side as the interloping cupbearer, unworthy of taking so much as a sip from whatever Olympian ambrosia she was drinking.”

The motif of mythology appears in the text to illuminate the characters’ relationships and personalities, and here, Noah uses mythological allusions to explain the distance he feels in his relationship to Lorelei. Where she is an Olympian goddess in her element among her fellow divine beings, Noah is her invisible servant; he has access to her world, but he’ll never belong to it. By referring to himself as “interloping” and “unworthy,” he goes beyond his belief in her intellectual superiority, implying that he is more generally inferior to her.

“And the whole point of a system like that is it allows you to keep your hands off the wheel, right? Charlie knew that. Not that he should’ve been texting, obviously. But he knew the car would take care of itself while he sent a few messages or picked his nose or whatever.”

Expanding on the theme of the complexities of technological dependence, Noah argues with Lorelei that Charlie felt he could be distracted in the minivan because the van advertised that he could. There was an assumed contract of trust between Charlie and the AI system, which Charlie took to mean that he could depend on the van to keep him safe while he was distracted. This passage highlights the general dilemma surrounding the accident, in which they are forced to consider how responsible they are for the AI’s decisions.

“For the Shaw siblings and people like them, the advantages of money and prestigious schools and attentive parents and accessible healthcare have always functioned automatically, a bit like the algorithms she adores. In this she resembles Charlie, blithely confident that the foundations will never crack.”

This quotation exemplifies Noah’s resentful feelings toward the Shaw family and others in their tax bracket for never needing to worry about their academics, careers, or health because of their immense pool of resources. Expanding on the theme of socioeconomic disparities and the security of wealth, Noah never had that kind of safety, so he frets about the stability of his life. He feels like the only person in his family who can see the legal dangers hurtling toward them, in part because he isn’t privileged like his wife—or his children.

“Charlie has developed into a spoiled, sheltered, self-involved rich kid. At his age I was working hard hours in hard job every week of every summer, all of it to build everything he now takes for granted. The whole blind cycle sickens me. Enrages me.”

Noah’s tense relationship with Charlie reaches a boiling point at Monet’s dinner when Charlie decides to stay out late the night before his police interview. In this moment, Noah recognizes how his sheltering of the boy has turned him arrogant and careless rather than attentive and responsible. Noah is eventually forced to realize that he is partly responsible for his son’s attitude and that some of the rage he feels is directed at himself.

“Her own bedding, still unmingled with mine in the washer, even in the dryer, and for over twenty years I have accommodated my wife’s eccentric requirements, building out the partitions between her things and mind, her space and mine, her habits and mine, her desires and mine, her flesh and mine.”

Throughout their married life, Noah has accommodated Lorelei’s condition by ensuring that she has control over her own space and possessions. However, Noah fears that these small physical accommodations catalyzed an even bigger divide in their relationship, propelling them into separate worlds. The parallel construction and repetition within the sentence (“her […] and mine”) emphasize this separation in all aspects of their life, even their most intimate moments, alluded to with “her flesh and mine.”

“Her phone was sitting on the deck above the companionway, and when this gust hit us, it slid over to the rail and got stuck beneath a cleat. Dissee couldn’t reach it, so she let go for a sec, let go of her line. She tried to brace herself with her legs, she had one foot up on the side, and she reached for the phone.”

Charlie describes the boating accident that led to Eurydice’s disappearance and how, in a critical moment, Eurydice endangered herself attempting to save her phone. This quotation raises the motif of cellphones and their connection to the complexities of technological dependence, as Eurydice saw the phone as such an integral part of her life that she tried to save it from harm, even though she has the resources to replace it. Her personal connection echoes the Cassidy-Shaw family’s connection to their own devices soon after the accident.

“The guardsman reaches down and pats the drone fondly, as if congratulating a hunting dog for bagging a fox.

‘These fellas have thermal sensors that work like a charm,’ he says. ‘Put a hundred of them up in the air and your search gets a thousand times more efficient. They’ll replace us all before long.’”

Following the search for Eurydice, a Coast Guard officer compliments the autonomous drones that found her. The officer’s interaction with the machine develops the theme of the complexities of technological dependence, as he trusts the machines to do their job better than humans. With the simile that draws a comparison between the drone and a hunting dog, the narrative emphasizes both the increasing ubiquity of technology and humans’ anthropomorphization of it.

“But no one can keep our kids safe forever, not even you, Daniel. No matter how much money we throw at the problem or how many guards we hire or how many tracking apps we put on our phones—no matter how good your algorithm is—we can’t protect them from everything. We just can’t.”

Lorelei dissects her own belief in algorithms in this quotation when she confronts Monet. She sees that she and Monet both want to control their family and program it like an algorithm to protect their children. However, Lorelei realizes that human life and emotions are too complex to ever contain them in such rigid calculations, and she urges Monet to see the error of their ways.

“Your son gets away with manslaughter because, hey, the lawyers can blame the autodrive in your fancy SUV. We’ve got high-end drug gangs using pattern recognition to track the movements of law enforcement vehicles. With these voice synthesizers and image generators, you can fake up whole new identities in an hour, then use them to rip off folks’ life savings.”

Detective Morrissey lectures Noah following the revelation that she can’t arrest Charlie for the car accident, and her speech develops the theme of negotiating responsibility in the age of AI from a law-enforcement perspective. Morrisey explains how AI complicates legal definitions of guilt because criminals can pass off accountability onto these autonomous machines, and she straightforwardly equates Charlie’s escape from accountability with that of “high-end drug gangs” and dangerous con artists.

“But people have to be better, too. They have to not drink and drive. They have to not text behind the wheel. We shouldn’t make these machines because we want them to be good for us, or good instead of us. We should make them because they can help us be better ourselves.”

Lorelei explains her perspective on the collaboration that needs to occur for AI to function effectively in society. To her, the onus of morality should not solely be on the AI systems; she doesn’t want people, like Charlie in the minivan, to use AI technology to enable their own bad habits. Instead, she envisions a world where AI can take on roles that free people up to improve themselves.

“Somebody has to do it, Noah. Somebody has to make these things behave, help them make good decisions. So they don’t mistake a family of five for a truck full of terrorists. So they don’t take out a school because of a glitched relay. They can’t—they have to—we have to—”

This quotation exemplifies Lorelei’s internal conflict about feeling responsible for the moral design of AI algorithms as one of the few people who understand its potential impact. Lorelei takes on more work than she can manage to help as many people as she can, and as such, she sees herself as ultimately responsible for all the AI systems’ malfunctions. The increasingly disjointed diction of this passage highlights the depth of her distress over this, while the movement from “[t]hey can’t” to “we have to” illustrates her continuing belief that humans are ultimately responsible for AI’s actions.