YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Holsinger

lines on the record: 48
first: 2025-07-24
most recent: 2025-07-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh my God. I was just my hands were shaking. And one of the things she does is she records the calls that she makes with authors. And in this case, I was like, I was so Like shaking and whatever. My voice sounded kind of understated. So I got dragged a little bit for just being like, oh my God, he's not even happy. But it was such a lightning strike. And so thrilling and flattering. There's a hundred other books published this summer that could have been her summer pick, but she chose culpability. And I just can't believe it.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it moved me more, probably more towards those environmental reasons that I was talking about. That was one of the real eye-opening revelations is just commonplace knowledge now, but often that we don't even talked about much journalism about the consumption. But in terms of the models themselves, I don't know. I think, especially with autonomous driving, I had a really bad accident that could have been really, really bad when my kids were in the car some years ago. This crumpled the front of a car and it was because of my negligence. And I thought I would much rather have had a machine driving that day. So that part of it, I think, this issue of autonomy and navigation, maybe I am a little more optimistic there. And I think the thing is, you know, artificial intelligence, as you know, is such a sloppy term for all these different things, all the machine learning, LLMs. So I think that you probably would have to kind of go through a questionnaire to get me optimistic or pessimistic.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't, I mean, you know, occasionally I'll often use it almost unintentionally as a Google search, right? But I am interested, there's this wonderful poet who teaches at the University of Maryland, Lily and Yvonne Bertram, who has used these small language models to generate these poems in the style of other poets, and doing it very intentionally. I'm excited about that, where our department is even doing, I think, a faculty search next year on AI and creative writing. We just hired somebody in AI and critical thought. You know, it's yes, it's transforming things very quickly under our feet, but I don't have the kind of dread of this that many colleagues do”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Analytical students who can just summarize this rather than reading it That, I think, is the scary is the wrong word, but sad. This is not, I'm just not just blaming students and young people. I don't read nearly as many novels as I used to. And when I do read novels, I get more impatient than I used to. I used to lounge around on my bed, read novels by Charles Dickens when I was like 16 years old. And for me now getting through a Dickens novel is a real challenge. I can't do it.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's going to undermine the value. It's not that I'm sanguine about that within the creative worlds, but I feel like there are people who are already doing really interesting experiments, collaborative experiments, with large language models, with small language models that are just interesting because art is interesting and technology is part of art. I'm much less worried about the arts than I am about young people and brains.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say, you know, the emergence of paper. I wrote a whole book on parchment, but this widespread technology that had been in place for a thousand years, and it continues to be used even today.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, right? Yeah, I'm one of those people who always pushes against the idea of these rigid medieval, early modern medieval Renaissance period boundaries. I'm much more interested in continuity and the way that those ruptures play into long-scale continuities. But I think that the printing press was an invention of the Middle Ages, not of the Renaissance. And I think it's a nice analogy to AI, I think, because it's not futuristic. It's coming out of so many kind of text generation computer generated things that have been in place for decades. And so looking at always being afraid of the newness of the technology, that in some ways is its own danger, I think. I don't know if you'd agree.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and hundreds of thousands of dissenters, heretics, Catholics or Protestants, depending where and when you are. And people talked about the printing press. Historians talk about it as an agent of change. And it obviously was. But manuscript cultures last for many, many centuries after the printing press. And people talked about the printing press as the tool of the devil, right? And conservative theologians would say, look, now the people can have the word of God in their hand. So I think that that, you know, it's one of those technological ruptures and in the culture of writing and literature and the written word people freaked out about it, just like we're freaking out about LLMs now. And, you know, it's very, very different kind of rupture. But democratization can have its dangers. You know, the book that you're talking about, Malleas Malafakaram, that hammer of witches, that also has a manual.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Medieval literature is my specialty. And I'm not calling for going back to the era of parchment and scribes. But there is something there about that slow attention and decelerating a bit.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is where we're all wrestling with this every department in my university has something called an AI guide where they're a faculty member, a colleague who were trying to come up. And I'm in an English department. We have a writing program. This is a big issue. But I agree with what Megan O'Rourke said in the Times the other day that this is the end of the take-home college essay. That is done. That is dead. That was never a big fan of that genre in the first place. But I do think there's a huge shift going on in assessment of student writing. And I don't know if it's all to the bad. I think there's a lot of space for more in-class writing for slow reading, for even just, you know, I have this vision of just teaching a class where we almost go in and have reading time, like in kindergartening or first grade. Where we're all just fixed on a physical text.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, not just enragement, but also massification. And one of these places, of course, is I have a son who's in the data analysis programming space and just the speed with which programming is being taken over and programming of programming. And the next frontier of these things, AI is making themselves better. By creating more AIs to make them better, you know, this kind of recursive loop that we're in. For me, the doom, the P-Doom is, I don't really have a number, but I'm much more in the cap of there's a kind of dark note, you know, Jeff Goodall, as he puts it, the heat will kill you first. The most dangerous thing about AI maybe is just data centers in general. And the consumption, thinking about Karen Howe's book, Empire AI, as that brilliant chapter on water use and energy use.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That profound moral ambivalence at the center of these problems. And I think there are people in that world, I imagine. I'm sure you know many of them who are dedicated to that. Like make them better, make them, if not good, at least ethical and are dedicating their lives to it and are probably really scared and are doing everything they can to dig us out of these trenches that these things have become.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And are these AI is going to train us to be better? It's always going to be a mixed back. We can get really excited about advances in protein folding visualization. And so on. But there's always going to be these kind of terrifying moral quandaries that they put us in at the same time. Laurelized voice is right on that razor's edge of the ethical dilemmas, right? That passage that you played from the audiobook, that is, you know, I wrote those passages to explore this.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, no, no, no. I agree. In everyday situations, and when you have someone calling us to be good, I think we can shape one another's moral consciousness, right? Right.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thus, in relationship to each other in new ways. I think it's always going to be a two way street. I don't think that's a squishy answer. I think we're caught in this world where we're in this Frankenstein world where we're creating these machines, or not we, not me, but we're using them. We're subject to many of their... You know, their controls”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a really wonderful question because it is the central dilemma, I think, of the novel of culpability is the title. Who is to blame? And Larle in the excerpts that she writes a book, and we get little excerpts from it called Silicon Souls on the Culpability of Artificial Minds. And as you read, you get little glimpses of that book, paragraphs, or a page at a time, just eight or nine of them sprinkled throughout the novel. And Lorelei is wrestling with this all the time. To what extent are we guilty if our machines do something bad? Are our machines training us to train us to be good? Could they train us to be better people? Because it's not just a one-way street. Yes, we're inventing them. We are responsible in many ways for how they are in the world. But we're also responsible for how we are, how we comport ourselves ethically in the world in relationship to them.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is treating people inequitably, and we're now in this place where these things are becoming a way of just taking any kind of the moral burden of our mistakes off of our shoulders, right? It's just another excuse for things. And she just stomps out of the hospital. And then... She drives away texting at the wheel, and Noah Caesar do it, and there's this kind of shiver of righteous glee that goes down his spine, one of the last scenes in the book.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, thank you. I'm really glad you brought up that passage and that character. So Lacey Morrissey is the Delaware police officer who is, she's the detective kind of looking into the accident, basically going after Charlie and saying, you know, you're not going to get away with this just because you're a Division I lacrosse recruit and you come from this fancy family and your dad's a lawyer and your mom's this world famous technologist and philosopher. And then she has this rant that she goes on, this very righteous rant that where she's like the conscience, where she's saying, you know, a kid from a housing project who's in this exact situation is going to get put in jail for an accident that your son might have, Noah, and get off with a slap on the wrist. And this is where we are right now. And AI is only exacerbating this problem, right? And the surveillance is.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, and it's um, I, you know, the details of that whole story that it's an HR person, they're just things that are just too perfect.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you're wearing our phones become our jumbotrons, right? We're carrying our jumbotrons around with us all the time”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ooh, I think it's a little bit of both. You know, that's a kind of stock feature in thrillers, right? Like the cameras on and airports and people dodging the cameras, putting on disguise to elude the ever-present surveillance state. So, yeah, obviously that notion of the panopticon from Foucault, you know, that it's not just that we're being watched, but we're aware of ourselves being watched. And that is a whole different kind of technology of the self and how we behave and how we comport ourselves in the public sphere with each other. And I think even I would imagine that even when we know we're not being surveilled, that still that sensibility is still there in some ways.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And yeah, and there's a, you know, there's arguments, the same arguments to be made for facial recognition, for shot spotting technology, right? Where'd the gunshot come from in the city? But they are also tools of surveillance. So you really, I think we really have to balance those kinds of. Algorithmic injustice, the way facial recognition deals differently with different people of different races, those are really difficult dilemmas. The culpability of the novel doesn't pretend to resolve them, but it wants to explore them, I think, in different ways.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, black box, exactly, as in a plane. And with AI controlled, with self-driving cars, that's all the more complicated. And yet it's also, there's probably a lot more information being collected. So it's like having 50 additional witnesses to what happened in the exact moment. What the driver was looking at, what the driver was doing, what other computers were on in the car, and so on. So that's another kind of frightening bit of surveillance technology, just like drones and so on.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the dynamics of the accident is Noah, the father, believes, you know, he was sitting in the front car. He mostly witnessed what happened. And he believes that the other car was swerving into their lane. He doesn't have any, you know, he doesn't, he isn't even thinking about the tech aspect of it. He's just thinking, okay, my son didn't do anything wrong. We're going to get through this. The police are going to interview you. It's going to be fine. And then, and this is one of the things I came across in the course of my research for the novel, this field called digital vehicle forensics. The police have whole units dedicated to if there's an accident, they go into the car's computer and they figure out exactly what happened from the computer's point”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Case, new technology, these things are going to happen. And so if we can just like an autonomous vehicle, yeah, it's going to kill people, but are they going to kill fewer people? Yeah. And then so I imagine the same thing is true in war, that the thing that's so uncanny, you know, is just that to imagine these drone swarms instead of just working with their human operators, they're working with each other and improving themselves. It's a machine learning technology once you put more than one in the air. They're learning from each other and they're learning about us. They're learning about our tactics. And that's obviously the more futuristic element of it. But this novel is very much set in the present. It's very much about a contemporary family going through the struggle of thing after this accident. And so I really wanted to make that feel present day.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, all right, so Lorelei would take, you know, if she were looking at this problem, and again, no spoilers, but she would probably say, well, if, okay, so they're going to kill civilians every now and then. But what if they kill far fewer civilians than conventional weapons?”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're working on it exactly, and they're farther ahead than you further ahead than we probably think they are. That's correct.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, that's the dilemma at the, you know, when we get this, there's a lot of snippets of different sorts of things, like paratextual elements throughout the novel and the Senate hearing as one, then New Yorker interview is one. The technology and where things are in terms of autonomous drone swarms, a lot of that, I think, is probably classified. Like you may know, I did a little poking and prodding.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amorally, yeah, amoral, exactly. And then there's a subtle difference there. And I think amorality is, and again, I think that's part of superintelligence. I think amorality is the... Kind of categories here that makes these things so good at what they do. Awful in what they do too.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know. I think, you know, obviously it is us in that so much of what's been uploaded. I think I checked that database with books three, right? And I think at least three of my previous novels are in that database. So it is speaking back to us in our own words in some way, but words that are manipulated, words that bounce off of us, again, in these ways that are coldly indifferent to our fates, but pretend empathy. And that's the scariest thing of all. If you can convince someone that you are empathetic, that you are sympathetic, that you are just like them, that you're here for them, and then that makes it all the easier to turn on them.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's not going to be artificial general intelligence, blah, blah, blah. There's not these things don't mean anything. And I wonder to me one of the superpowers of LLMs is their complete indifference to us. And that is scary, the coldness of it, to me that seems like one of the, I'm trying to play around with that a lot in the novel is. How that how that is one of the things that it has that separates it from us doesn't make it better than us. It just makes it very, very different. And I don't know if we've recognized that yet in our accounting for what this intelligence is. I don't know what you think of that.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More destructive kind of mindset. So it is, even though Blair, and that's why that's the great thing about writing fiction is you can manipulate those kind of moral codes. You can have what seems to be good, ethical on the surface be much darker and less amoral underneath. That, I think, is what I was trying to get at. And that's one of the, and I would love to know what you think of this. I think the we have this, you know, whenever I talk, in my day job, I'm a literature professor. I teach at the University of Virginia. And there's a whole, there's a real kind of minimization and almost disdain for LLMs in big parts of my profession.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't know if there's risk in doing it in a novel, but I don't know if that is how I would read those passages. I see that relationship as, you know, Blair, it's almost like, and again, I don't want to give too much away, but so that Blair is kind of programmed to make Alice good, right? The way I was imagining it is whoever's coding this thing, you know, steer her on the right moral path. And in this case, the right moral path is supposedly to reveal something or to hold back from doing something rash and dangerous. And yet the way Alice responds to it, it's almost like Blair's surface-level ethical consciousness, you know, to the extent that an LLM can have one, which it can't, but I just mean, you know, whatever it's being programmed to do, steers Alice in, as I think we see over the course of the novel into a”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that was based on just listening to looking at transcripts of some of these chatbot conversations going on with teenagers right now and just thinking about this crisis of companionship and friendship and loneliness. And this just seemed like something that would be an obvious part of the novel.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I do want to flag the audiobook narrator. There were two of them. The woman, January Lavoy, who did the voice of Laurelai's excerpts and the two voices in the chat, absolutely brilliant, just uncanny what she does with those passages.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when she's in the hospital after this accident, she starts texting somebody, even though she has this concussion and the doctors take it, oh, you know, she shouldn't be on there more than a little bit at a time, but it's a good sign that she can deal with that. And so her dad is, you know, when she's home, her dad is like, who are you texting? And she says, it's my friend, my new friend. I met her in the hospital. And Noah thinks, oh, this is great. Finally, she has a friend, even if it's just a friend she's texting. And then we learn very quickly that this Blair is an AI. She's in a large language model. She's a chatbot that Alice has befriended on this app. And the thread of their texts, I think there's 10 or 12 of them in just very short little bursts throughout the novel. And they contain no spoilers, but they contain a lot of the suspense, a lot of the issues of culpability in the book.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Alice is the middle child, as you point out, and her siblings, Charlie and Izzy, are dynamic, charismatic. They've got friends to burn. They're just sweet, easy kids to get along with. And Alice is the more troubled one. She doesn't have friends. Her parents worry about that”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we do it without noticing, though. There's this soft creep of things. And the times that we, maybe the times that we most resisted is when there's glitches. So there's these moments where you realize, okay, we need to seize some control back. And I find myself the Jonathan Haidt argument where in this age of profound distraction and just getting away from the digital world, let alone AI for a little while can be really helpful.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I suppose so. I haven't articulated it that way before, but that's really wonderful. You know, there's this passage at the end of the prologue in Noah's Voice, where, you know, Laura is thinking, Lorelei always thinks that she always says that a family is like an algorithm. A family is like an algorithm. These parts working in concert with each other, the variables changing. And then, of course, he says until it isn't, until it isn't an algorithm, until things go wrong. And maybe, you know, I wasn't thinking of it this way, but maybe Charlie taking that wheel, which he does at the last second, you know, resting things away from the AI is a nice metaphor for our desire to kind of intervene in this world that where we feel like so much of our autonomy is being taken away. It's a very human gesture on his part, I think. Of course, it's also a dangerous gesture of what's the immediate cause of the accident.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slow down. Yeah, I've caused myself two accidents over the years that completely totaled the car I was driving out of my own negligence and idiocy. And so who are we to say that we're safer drivers? I don't know. So I'm with you.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I suppose so. I'm maybe a little less worried about bots taking over the world. I'm much more worried about slop and disinformation and what it's doing to our students. I'm no expert. This is a novel, but reading around in journals like philosophy and technology or nature, machine intelligence about autonomous driving, I don't understand a lot of the technical aspects of it. But the philosophical part I can kind of grasp and Lorelei is convinced that there is a good to be done with machine autonomy in certain spheres and saving lives is her driving factor. And she's not a tech billionaire. She's in the middle of it. She's worried about it. She's kind of terrified. As are many, but also feels like it's her job to help make the world safer with these things.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't really know many people in the tech industry, but I, you know, I read your book. I listened to a lot of interviews with people. And if you'll notice, there's this mocked up New Yorker interview with Daniel Monet. And I went in portraying him. I really wanted to avoid stereotyping. It's not that I'm too worried about stereotyping tech billionaires, but I didn't want him to be a stock figure. So, you know, there's a tragedy in his recent past too, but he's also very cynical about ethics. And he's like, sure, we want to make the world a safer, better place. But he also calls out the hypocrisy of so much ethical language, just like you do. It's the idea that their primary concern is safety. So he's really in that world, in that speaking in that idiom.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I relate probably more to Noah because I'm someone I'm always in awe of my wife and her brain. But I also, you know, I'm an academic, Lorelei is an academic. Noah is a lawyer. He's a commercial lawyer working at a firm. Laurelai comes kind of from this fancy blue-blood family. Her sister's the dean of the law school at University of Pennsylvania. So I think I wanted that relationship, as you point out, we're only seeing it from Noah's point of view. What we get laurelized voice and snippets from her work. Noah, he puts her up on a pedestal, but he also doesn't understand her in many ways. He just has no clue what kind of work she does. He has a really hard time, even understanding what she's writing. And so she's in some ways.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it's a little bit scary, but although in some ways, you know, somebody pointed out to me at an event last week that it's the, in some ways, it's the humans that are doing scarier things in the book, or at least, but I wanted that a kind of uncanniness of the tech, especially this chat bot that one of the daughters is interacting with.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I used it Waymo a couple times that was not until actually I started this book and then I test drove a couple of models I can maybe some big Chrysler thing that you know and they now have self-driving mode on if you're on certain roads and that of course there's Tesla I've been in a lot of Tesla Ubers where the guys you know will just put the thing on you know lane changing auto technology and so I don't have one but I was really fascinated by it”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting, you know, the novel really started with just this wanting to deal with this accident. And I didn't even initially, I wasn't even thinking about an autonomous car. I was just thinking, okay, I really want to explore what happens to this family, different degrees of responsibility. And then, you know, when I realized, okay, well, who would be responsible? Then I just, you know, we had this, I don't even remember what kind of car just with, you know, some lane guidance and so on. And I thought, yeah, that's interesting. What if the car is somewhat to blame? This was really before, what was it, late 2022 when the chat GPT craze, people started talking outside your industry about AI in general? Yes, indeed. And then so I was already writing this book and then boom, it was like this explosion with LLMs. And suddenly I realized, oh, this novel is actually about autonomy and culpability in this world newly defined.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the novel spins out around who is responsible, who is culpable, and why. And so that's one issue that it's trying to tackle. And then the other is just exploring our world newly enlivened by these chatbots, by drones, by autonomous vehicles, by smart homes and so on, and immersing the reader in a suspenseful drama that gets at some of those issues at the same time while making them really essential to the plot, to the suspense and so on.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I see the book as maybe trying to do two things. One, as you said, it's a contemporary family drama about just something really bad that happens to this family. They get in this bad car accident while they're driving the family minivan over to Willacross tournament in Delaware. But the van is in autonomous mode or self-driving mode. And their son Charlie, kind of a charismatic lacrosse star, he's at the wheel, but he's not driving. And then the dad, Noah, is distractedly writing on his laptop. He's trying to finish a legal memo. The daughters are in the car on their phones as tween kids often are. And the mom named Lorelei, she's an expert in the field of ethical, artificial intelligence. She's like this world-leading figure. And she's writing in her notebook, getting ready for a conference. And then they have this awful accident. And then the rest of the novel and much of the society.”
2025-07-24 · On with Kara Swisher · When AI F*s Up, Who’s to Blame? With Bruce Holsinger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT