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- [00:03]
Dina Temple-Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here. What if the hardest questions about artificial intelligence weren't about technology at all? What if they were about us? Because when AI collides with family, with morality, with justice itself, it doesn't just generate text or images, it generates consequences. That's the starting point for Bruce Hulsinger's new novel, Culpability. You might have seen it. It's an Oprah Book Club pick, but it's also right in our wheelhouse. It's a family drama about what happens when a family gets entangled with, of all things, algorithms. About what happens when technology rewrites our oldest questions, like who's to blame, who's accountable? And what does justice look like in an age of generative AI? I'm Dina Temple Rast, and this is Click Here, a podcast about the people making and breaking our digital world. Now, Bruce Hulsinger isn't just a novelist. He's also a professor at the University of Virginia, thinking daily about AI in the classroom and how it's reshaping academia and students choices and even the act of writing itself. It's fiction, but fiction that feels very close to the world we're living in now. So we sat down to talk about the world he creates and culpability, and about what happens when our digital tools start writing endings we never expected. And we'll try to keep spoilers here to a minimum. Stay with us.
- [01:46]
Recorded Future News Announcer
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on? Click Here, then check out our sister publication, the Record. From Recorded Future News, you'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to therecord media.
- [02:12]
Dina Temple-Raston
From Recorded Future News. This is Click here. Could you introduce yourself to us, please?
- [02:22]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yes, I'm Bruce Hulsinger.
- [02:24]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
And what do you do?
- [02:26]
Bruce Hulsinger
Oh, yeah, I'm Bruce Hulsinger.
- [02:31]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
This is a great start.
- [02:32]
Bruce Hulsinger
This is wonderful. I'm Bruce Hulsinger. I'm a fiction writer, an author, and I'm an academic teaching in the English department at the University of Virginia.
- [02:41]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So for people who haven't picked up your book culpability yet, what are you trying to do? It's a novel. Is it a warning? A mirror? What do you think?
- [02:51]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I don't think of novels as op eds, but I do want people to come away from culpability with a desire to slow down a bit as we immerse ourselves into these new technologies, into the world of artificial intelligence. I guess the novel is kind of a cautionary note, but I also want people to come away Having read a great story, a suspenseful family drama.
- [03:14]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Can you tell us just enough without giving anything away about the story?
- [03:19]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yeah, we begin in a minivan. A family of five is driving to a lacrosse tournament on the eastern shore of Delaware. The son, Charlie, the older son, he's in the driver's seat. The dad, Noah, is in the passenger seat next to him, typing a legal memo on his computer.
- [03:38]
Dina Temple-Raston
This is from the audiobook.
- [03:39]
Audiobook Narrator
By the time we cross the state line, a quick glance out the passenger window. Welcome to Delaware with a wave like Swoosh in two shades of blue. Home of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Emblazoned along the bottom. The memo is nearly done. In 10 minutes I will email a draft to the managing partner, completing this last work task before the family weekend officially begins. I cock my head at the screen, staring down a final problematic phrase and Charlie Stop. Alice screaming from behind me. Charlie's left hand clutches the wheel. Jerks. An alarm blares from the dashboard.
- [04:23]
Bruce Hulsinger
Now the opening twist is that Charlie is not actually driving. He's sitting in the driver's seat, but the van is in self driving mode. So the rest of the novel is trying to think about who was responsible for this accident and why. And it's, it's really exploring questions of agency, of accountability or of autonomy and the title word culpability in the framework of this family trying to get over this pretty horrible accident in which all of them really feel implicated.
- [04:56]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So typically, since you're a medievalist, you're usually talking about plagues and parchment and penitence. Why did you end up deciding that you wanted to write something about generative AI and the complexities of blame?
- [05:10]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yeah, so I started writing fiction many years ago. Didn't publish my first book, I think until 2014, but I'd all along been reading about the history of technology, the history of parchment and the printing press. And I've always been interested in the relationship between human culture and technology. One of my novels, the Invention of Fire, dealt with the coming of the first gunpowder weapons in Western Europe. My last novel was about climate change and climate displacement. So I was really thinking about the role of technology and news and information and meteorology and so on in this novel. I suppose it didn't really start out as a novel about artificial intelligence. It started out just thinking about an accident, thinking about responsibility. Then As I was writing it and thinking, how do all these family members feel responsible? How do they feel guilty? I started thinking about, okay, what if Charlie isn't even driving this thing? What if it's an autonomous mode? But I wasn't thinking about artificial intelligence. And I finished the first draft right before ChatGPT came onto the scene, kind of towards the end of 2022. And as I was revising, I was realizing, oh my God, right? This is a novel about AI, or it's at least about how AI is seeping into our lives in all these different ways. With chatbots, with autonomous vehicles, with drones, smart homes, let alone the kind of large language models that are taking over so much of how, how writing is produced in technological contexts.
- [06:47]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So before writing this book, what kind of relationship did you have with AI?
- [06:51]
Bruce Hulsinger
Slim to none, I think. I. I mean, I. Now that I. Now that I've learned a lot more about AI, I realize, okay, every time I would go on, you know, an insurance company website to find out if my premium had been paid and talk to the bot that was artificial intelligence. Every in. In some ways, those were early examples of large language models. One of the reasons I thought of a car in autonomous mode is I have some of those safety features now on almost any car have something to do with machine learning. You put your car in cruise control and it stays a certain number of car lengths back from the car in front of it. That's a primitive version of the same technology that's being used to pilot Waymo, these driverless taxi cabs in San Francisco and other cities. So I suppose just like anyone else living in a modern industrialized world, AI has been creeping into all our lives in different ways. For a while before I started writing the book.
- [07:46]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
And had you taken an autonomous car for a drive or walked into one of those autonomous taxis?
- [07:54]
Bruce Hulsinger
Not before I started writing the book. But once I was writing the book, I decided I really need to do this. So not only did I ride a couple of Waymos when I was. The last time I was in California, while I was drafting the book, I even went and test drove some autonomous cars. Not fully autonomous, but cars that have autonomous mode. And there's more and more of them. I mean, you'd be surprised the number of people that are on highways that are in hands free mode. It doesn't mean that they're supposed to be goofing off on their phones, although they, they could be. The cars have a way of warning you against that. But more and more, there, there really are these Machine learning technologies. These AIs that are piloting cars on the, on the highway, and when you're.
- [08:35]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
In one of these autonomously driven vehicles, do you think they're marvelous or creepy?
- [08:41]
Bruce Hulsinger
I want to ask you the same question. I don't know if you've ridden in a Waymo before. The last time I was in San Francisco in the Bay Area, I took a couple of them just because, and this was on book tour a few weeks ago, and I'd been in them before and they were more jerky, they were more kind of experimental. Now they're just part of the fabric of that city's life. Same in la. And I find them really reliable and they're still uncanny. But, you know, you think about going in an Uber, how many times have you been in an Uber where the driver hasn't texted, hasn't been on their phone doing something else? For me, that's, I could count it probably on one hand. And for good reason. Gig workers, they work very hard. Their, their job is to get their next ride, whereas the overriding mission of a Waymo is to get you to your destination safely and ensure the safety of everyone around you. So they are built primarily for safety and I find that comforting. And so I, you know, I have mixed feelings about it, but I do feel like it's the wave of the future.
- [09:47]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
I've never ridden in one, but what I've heard is that the Waymo actually drives like a 16 year old. You know how they are cautious at every corner and scared they're going to hit something. Is that you?
- [09:56]
Bruce Hulsinger
I think. Okay, I will say I think that was true two years ago. I don't think it's true now. I think they're more, they're doing a little more offensive driving in a safe way, you know, because it's, it's not safe to be completely defensive when you're driving. So I, I really, I think they're, they're getting better.
- [10:14]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Got it.
- [10:14]
Bruce Hulsinger
And which is the point. That's the point of machine learning. Right?
- [10:17]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Right. Well, well, yeah, theoretically, they just get smarter, not dumber.
- [10:20]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [10:22]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So it's easy to see AI as this whole new era in human existence, but in some of your other books, you've talked about other technologies that change the world, like gunpowder, and you kind of run into the humanity of it all. So I'm curious, do you see through lines between issues people wrestled with in medieval times and the age of artificial intelligence?
- [10:46]
Bruce Hulsinger
I do. And I suppose the big one for me would be the printing Press, which comes about right at the heart of the late Middle Ages in the late 15th century. And it's very much about the speed of the dissemination of ideas and that's one of its primary revolutionary capacities. I do believe we learn a lot from history, but I think there's, there's probably some false parallels. You know, the printing press was also a very deliberative kind of technology where people were, you know, even though it could produce pages much more quickly, there still was very much hands on human labor involved. And there is in AI technologies too, but it's just fundamentally different. I'm no expert in AI even having written this novel, but to me those, those parallels can be, can be also, you know, maybe less informative than they might seem.
- [11:40]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
What do you think medieval people would make of AI?
- [11:44]
Bruce Hulsinger
Great question. I think as with any modern technology, there would be this kind of astonishment. You know, certainly in the medieval Christian context there's all kinds of miracles associated with those kinds of technologies. You know, kind of a miraculous writing machine. But you know, I like the idea of, you know, introducing, introducing ChatGPT to a 9th century monastery. Let's see what happens. I was just going to say that's my next novel.
- [12:13]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
But I also wonder too, on the other side for modern society, there aren't that many technologies that we find so awe striking or so magical in a way. And it feels to me like AI is the first technology in a really long time that we've had where we're kind of aghast by what it might be able to do.
- [12:36]
Bruce Hulsinger
Oh, that's a great way of putting it. And I think people in my world, in the humanities world can be very cynical. And I think it can be good when the new technology comes in like this to give way to the awe. And one of the things I think I was trying to do in culpability, I see AI as a new kind of speciation. It feels like the Cambrian explosion in the way that Stephen Jay Gould once wrote about it, that we have all these new species emerging around us. And I think that the extraordinary feeling of being in a waymo or having ChatGPT answer a prompt in extraordinary detail. Yes, we can be cynical about it. We can talk about ravenous big tech, we can talk about the environmental devastation that so many of these models are creating. But I do think that the reason that they're successful is because of that wonder that they can inspire. This is something new and different. Wonder is not necessarily positive. Right. It can be a dark kind of wonder at the same time, when we.
- [13:39]
Dina Temple-Raston
Come back, Bruce Hulsinger shows us why the bots in his novel aren't necessarily the villains, and how culpability may not rest where we expect. Because this is a story about AI, sure. But more than that, it's a story about us, about the bargains we strike with technology, and what we're willing to surrender in return. Stay with us. This episode of Click Here is brought to you by Tess Bros, a small business built by Tesla owners for Tesla owners. They're in the business of solving the problems only Tesla owners really understand. So if you want to customize Protector, just make your Tesla work a little better for you. Check out Tespros. We're running an exclusive giveaway with Tespros that you won't want to miss. Enter now for your chance to win a DIY PPF Full body wrap kit tailored to your ride, either the Model Y Juniper or the Cybertruck. This prize is worth up to $2,500 and gives you the ultimate choice of colored PPF, clear matte or gloss PPF, or even a vinyl wrap option for the Cybertruck. To enter the contest, click on the link in the Show Notes where you can complete tasks and earn tickets to win. So head to the link in our Show Notes today for your chance at a custom Cybertruck wrap from Tespros.
- [15:07]
Bruce Hulsinger
At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab Adventures on the Edge of what We Think We Know Wherever you get.
- [15:37]
Dina Temple-Raston
Your podcasts, click here. We've been talking about AI in the abstract. Ethics, history, philosophy. But novels don't live in the abstract. They live in marriages and family fights and late night whispers. So when Bruce Hulsinger wanted to explore culpability, he didn't set it in a gleaming lab or in a corporate boardroom. He put it in the front seat of a minivan. Here's the rest of our conversation, so.
- [16:08]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Let'S talk a little bit more about the book. The book's emotional center is this relationship between the narrator, Noah, and his wife Lorelei, who's an academic who's sort of wrestling with all the different threads that go into ethics and AI. What made you want to explore these questions through a marriage, rather than, say, a company or a Lab.
- [16:31]
Bruce Hulsinger
That's probably just my own taste. I really love reading novels about messed up contemporary families. And these days, those are the novels that I write, or not necessarily messed up, but, you know, families confronting a big crisis. And marriage, of course, is at the heart of that. And so, you know, Noah is. I wouldn't call him a schlub, but he's a perfectly competent corporate lawyer. But he's very aware of his wife's brilliance. She's a mystery to him in so many ways. The way her mind works, her emotional life is a mystery to him, even though he's incredibly supportive and always has been. I tried initially to get inside her point of view. And the way I did it instead was writing excerpts from her book, which is called Silicon Souls on the Culpability of Artificial Minds. And we see, you know, the first thing that you read in the book is an excerpt from her book.
- [17:25]
Lorelei (character from the novel)
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.
- [17:38]
Bruce Hulsinger
And it's a kind of mock epigraph. And then immediately, as soon as you read it, you get into Noah talking about her and talking about her work. And so I think that, you know, having Lorelai as a mystery to Noah in the same way that AI is a mystery to so many of us, it's not a transparent allegory one to one, but it does give us a sense of the mystery of this marriage to our narrator, even as the world around us creates these mysteries.
- [18:06]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Yeah, I read the book, and I thought she was like a human stand in for AI because she was a black box to him.
- [18:13]
Bruce Hulsinger
Exactly. Well, he says that, you know, that's his analogy is Lorelei, my beautiful black box. And black box, of course, as many of your listeners will know, is that analogy in AI systems, where all these incredibly complex machine learning exercises, there's one point, even for the people who build them, there's a bit of a mystery in exactly how they work at certain points. That is the black box.
- [18:38]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So let's talk a little bit about Blair. Who? A character in the book. It's a chatbot that Noah and Lorelai's daughter Alice seems to be very focused on.
- [18:47]
Lorelei (character from the novel)
Blair, you there? Hey, sweetie. How is the pain today?
- [18:54]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Not great.
- [18:55]
Lorelei (character from the novel)
About the same as yesterday.
- [18:57]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
And what I thought was interesting about the way you worked this chatbot into the book is that particularly now, we see a lot of news headlines about chatbots doing bad things to people.
- [19:08]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yes.
- [19:09]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Or bad things particularly to teenagers who can Be very impressionable, give them bad advice. But your Blair chatbot seems to be sort of like the good angel sitting on Alice's shoulder instead of the bad one. Can you talk about that?
- [19:24]
Bruce Hulsinger
Recently in the New York Times, there was this editorial by a mother who was talking about the last conversation her daughter had had with a chatbot before she took her own life. And I think there's so many, you know, scary. These very uncanny, scary interactions that especially young people are having with these bots. But it's not all that way. In some ways, Alice as the human, she is the more misbehaving person in that relationship. And Blair is trying, you know, to an extent that a large language model can try to steer her along a better path. So Alice finds her and invents her on an app called have a pal. You know, just have a pal.
- [20:08]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
And Alice doesn't have a pal, which is part of that.
- [20:11]
Bruce Hulsinger
Exactly. So Alice is a. Alice is the struggling middle child. Noah and Lorelai are both aware that she's Charlie and Izzy, her siblings, are charismatic. They have friends to burn. They're athletic. Alice is not so much, and she's really struggling. And so she finally finds a friend, unbeknownst to her parents or her siblings. This friend happens to be a chatbot that she spends all this time communicating with.
- [20:36]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
And did you purposely go against chatbot type by making it positive instead of negative?
- [20:43]
Bruce Hulsinger
I really like to write against predictability so that you're expecting this chatbot to maybe convince Alice to do something bad. And I don't want to give any spoilers, but in the end, it may be that the chatbot is reacting to something that it already knows, and that, to me, seems darker, less predictable. And again, it's more that you get, I might say, eight or nine little excerpts of these conversations between Alice and Blair throughout the novel. And I wanted them to be a kind of. They build some momentum, they create some suspense, and in the end, they really tell us something significant about what happened in the highway that day.
- [21:22]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So one of these major plot points hinges on the idea of digital vehicle forensics. The little black boxes that track everything. We think of them as being in airplanes, but they're in cars now, too. Can you tell me a little bit about what you learned about that world?
- [21:38]
Bruce Hulsinger
You know, when. When novelists do research for novels, it's. It can be deeper, it can be shallow. In this case, it was just a Google search. It was like, okay, so what happens when. Blah, blah, blah, when, you know, an investigating officer is dealing with a A car that has a really sophisticated computer in it. And many, I mean, almost all new cars do now, I guess. And so I, I just realized there's learned that there's whole divisions of highway investigations now that are dealing with digital forensics. And so you have very sophisticated computer systems that attach to the sophisticated computer systems taken out of cars and basically tell you everything that happened. And the more sophisticated the car and self driving mode, you know, they have to be very sophisticated, the more the computer is going to tell you. And so in the novel I was imagining the, the AI system almost as a sixth passenger and certainly the most informed witness in the car. So what happened, you know, it can record sound, it can record movement. It has to, you know, in order to make things work, it records everything going on inside the car, outside the car. So that alone is a kind of uncanny mode of surveillance of what we're doing. And it, you know, the idea that it can track who's doing what, or at least to some extent what the other computers in the car are doing, what the phones are doing, that struck me as creepy. And the fact that Noah, one of the things that Noah is worried about is Charlie's culpability. Not just Charlie's responsibility, but his legal culpability and how he, you know, what he, how he may be responsible for what happened in the car because the last second he jerks the wheel. We know this from the beginning. And he's 17. Is he legally vulnerable? So Noah's very worried about that. And so when the DVF system comes in, he is really concerned about what it's going to say and whether it's more reliable than anyone else in the car, especially him, since he was the.
- [23:35]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Responsible adult that day, right, Sitting in the front seat. And DVF is a digital vehicle. Forensics coming back, is that what you're talking about?
- [23:44]
Dina Temple-Raston
The three initials?
- [23:45]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yes, exactly. Exactly, yes.
- [23:47]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So do you think all the surveillance, the sensors in our cars, phones in our houses, changes us in some way or does it just reveal what was always there?
- [23:57]
Bruce Hulsinger
Probably a little bit of both. I mean, I do think there's so much surveillance that we all give into every time we log onto our computers. You know, but I do find these systems, surveillance systems, creepy. You know, I worry about, you know, what they're doing to our relationships to each other, our interactions with each other, our online lives. You know, I worry a lot about that.
- [24:22]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So one of the interesting thoughts that occurred to me when I was reading the book is whether or not we can really outsource guilt to machines. And this is clearly a theme you're dealing with. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [24:34]
Bruce Hulsinger
There's this medieval theological concept called happy guilt. Felix culpa. And the idea is that we are that the fall in the Garden of Eden, the fall of Adam and Eve, the loss of paradise is a kind of happy guilt because in Christian theology, without the fall, there wouldn't have been Jesus Christ. Right? So guilt is something that we should embrace and it's something that is, you know, we should be happy that, that we are fallen human beings and that, that Adam and Eve fell from grace in the Garden of Eden because it saved us at the end. So that's the, that's a very common Christian narrative in the Middle Ages, and I think even now. And so, you know, translating that to this book, I, I think that there's, and maybe this is a kind of subtext of Lorelai's philosophy. I mean, and again, I'm not a philosopher, I'm not an expert in this, but in writing her book, I read so much of the work in that field and started to think about, you know, the machines as our, not as our allies, but in some ways as our co conspirators. They can, they share our guilt if we're the ones who built them. What does it mean to assign guilt or responsibility or culpability to a machine? And so Lorelei has all these scenarios going in her work, like the famous trolley problem, right, where you're, you know, you're, you're standing at an intersection of a, you know, the crossing of a trolley track. If you do nothing, the trolley will, you know, move ahead and go over into the left hand track and kill five people who are tied to the track. If you pull a lever, the trolley will go right instead and it will only kill one person. What do you do? Now that's a very simple but very complex philosophical dilemma, but it's one that people who design these systems have to have to think about.
- [26:24]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So your book had already come out, and then a jury finds that Tesla was partially responsible for a fatal crash that involved one of its self driving cars.
- [26:35]
Bruce Hulsinger
A Tesla owner was driving with the car's autopilot engaged when the Tesla accelerated through an intersection, hitting a parked car and its owners standing nearby. One of those owners died.
- [26:46]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Where were you when that headline came out?
- [26:49]
Bruce Hulsinger
I'm sure I was on book tour. I knew about the case already and I'd investigated it. I read up on it so I would know. And there were a couple other cases like that too. And I wonder, you know, one, at one point, Lorelais is, towards the end of the book, she can go into preachy mode sometimes and she's saying, okay, so if a self driving car veers and kills five people, that's going to be national news. But if a tractor trailer kind of run, you know, driven by some tired driver, veers over the center line and kills the same family, it's going to be local news. We'll, we'll read about it maybe for one day. Why is one, why is one so remarkable and the other so unremarkable? Because, you know, so many tens of thousands of people die on our highways every year. So why is it that, you know, it's autonomous vehicles that where the lawsuits are so visible and so huge? It's a really good question and it's, it's one that I don't have an answer. I have no idea. You know, it's just one of those, one of those problems that society is going to have to grasp.
- [27:54]
Dina Temple-Raston
When we come back, Bruce and I delve into the moral burdens of AI and whether he feels optimistic about our future with the machines. More with Bruce Hulsinger in just a moment. Stay with us.
- [28:17]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So I wanted to talk a little bit about Lorelei and how she spends much of the book writing about these moral burdens of AI and you have these essays of hers that are interspersed in the novel.
- [28:30]
Lorelei (character from the novel)
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.
- [28:48]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Are her thoughts at all a reflection of your own feelings about AI?
- [28:53]
Bruce Hulsinger
No, I really. She almost became an AI for me, like an oracle, an oracular kind of figure. And I was trying to, I was trying more to identify with Noah and just having this, this absolutely brilliant person that you love and you share your life with and trying to understand her mind. So I was trying to get close to her, trying to write in her voice, but also keeping her at a distance.
- [29:19]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Got it. So you mentioned Daniel Monet. He's this tech billionaire.
- [29:23]
Dina Temple-Raston
Did you model him after anyone?
- [29:26]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Because he sort of begins almost as satire and then he sort of changes along the way.
- [29:31]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yeah, I really wanted not to stereotype the tech billionaire. I think there's just way too much of that in popular culture right now. So he's not an immediately recognizable Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos type. He's subtler than that, I guess. And when we get an interview with him as. I just kind of wrote this mock new Yorker interview. We learn about some of the tragedies that have shaped his own life and what they mean for him and what they mean for his work. But in the case of Monet, I was really trying to. To create a more interesting, less predictable kind of character.
- [30:02]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So you mentioned that you were already writing the book when ChatGPT went public. What was it like watching the world suddenly discover generative AI in real time? And did that inform the way you ended up writing the book?
- [30:19]
Bruce Hulsinger
It absolutely did. I think I saw it first through the lens of my students and my colleagues in the Department of English who are struggling suddenly with this technology that, you know. And I heard people say things like, well, you know, we don't tell calculus students they can't use a calculator. Why should we tell writing students they can't use ChatGPT? No one was really actually arguing that, but it was a kind of thought experiment, like, what are we now doing in this moment? And seeing all these tech reporters saying, why is this chatbot trying to break up my marriage? Right. You know, suddenly we were in this world where, you know, when you log onto your computer and you can't trust language in a way that's coming at you so even more quickly than it had before. And so in that moment, it was, I think, a few months after that, I started realizing the novel that I'm writing is about artificial intelligence. It is a story about the creep of AI and all these aspects of our lives, about this world that's suddenly populated with all these. These. Again, I used the word species earlier with these species that we don't recognize, that are doing all these things that are becoming agentic, that are having agency alongside us, even while they. Even while they're taking away some of our autonomy. We're threatening to. At least.
- [31:41]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
As we mentioned, you're a professor at University of Virginia. What are your feelings about students using AI in class? Are you allowing it? How are you managing it?
- [31:51]
Bruce Hulsinger
Well, I think we're all managing it in different ways. There's some colleagues of mine who are advocating a lot more in class writing more slow writing, slowing down, slow reading, because our students are also using it for reading, for digesting texts that they're supposed to read. So it becomes a kind of insta Cliffs Notes, Right?
- [32:08]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
No way. Really?
- [32:10]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yeah. Yeah, because people will say, why read a whole novel when I can just get ChatGPT reader. Other colleagues talk about students going on these things on their laptops during class to come up with, you know, something to say when they raise their Hand. I think it would be a big mistake to shy away in this Luddite way and just say these are pure evil and we just have to banish them. I think we need to find smart ways of integrating them into the classroom. All right, I'm going to ask you all to write a fixed form lyric. Write a Sestina. Now ask ChatGPT. Open your computers. Now ask ChatGPT to write a sestina on the same subject. Okay. Read it. Now close your computer and let's compare the two. Right. Like those kinds of exercises where you see what these weird AIs can do that's parallel to what you're doing, to what we're doing as a class. I think we're going to have a lot of experiments like that so that we see them for the technological. For the tools that they are, rather than for substitutes for our own analysis and thinking. Or at least that's what I hope we're going to do.
- [33:15]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
And maybe the kids will even see AI isn't as good as I thought it was.
- [33:20]
Bruce Hulsinger
I hope so. Although these things are getting better and better.
- [33:24]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
That is a problem.
- [33:26]
Bruce Hulsinger
Yeah.
- [33:27]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
So you're painting this world in culpability that feels just a few degrees removed from ours, but not much more.
- [33:33]
Dina Temple-Raston
Are you optimistic about the future of.
- [33:36]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Tech or are you dreading it a bit?
- [33:39]
Bruce Hulsinger
I think I'm a doomer. The novel isn't as doomy as you'd think. And I do think culpability is very much on the edge of our moment. It's not trying to be futuristic or dystopian. It's very much about the present day and a family going through a kind of, you could call it a tech crisis. That's right in our moment. And I, you know, when I think about AI in particular, I don't so much worry about the models themselves and what they're doing as I do about the environment and the amount of water and energy that they're using. I am very much of the school of, you know, the heat will get us first, and AI is just now becoming part of that. It's just exacerbating the crisis that was already there. I think that's kind of where I come down.
- [34:28]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
Is there something else I should have asked you that I didn't ask you?
- [34:32]
Bruce Hulsinger
I don't think so. The conversation was incredibly thorough.
- [34:35]
Interviewer (possibly Dina Temple-Raston or another host)
I really liked the book, actually.
- [34:37]
Bruce Hulsinger
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
- [34:41]
Dina Temple-Raston
AI is supposed to make our lives easier, safer, more efficient. But Bruce Hulsinger's novel reminds us that efficiency doesn't erase consequence. Technology may drive the car, write the essay, or even offer comfort to a lonely child, but it doesn't carry the guilt we do. And that's the unsettling and maybe hopeful part of culpability that even in an age of algorithms, the oldest questions remain ours to answer. This is Click.
- [35:24]
Recorded Future News Announcer
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on? Click Here. Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.
- [35:49]
Dina Temple-Raston
Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories from the past week. It's Tuesday, September 30th. The cost of entry for America's tech workforce just got $100,000 steeper.
- [36:05]
Bruce Hulsinger
The president signed an executive action enforcing a one time fee of $100,000 for H1B visas.
- [36:12]
Dina Temple-Raston
Until last week, an H1B visa cost about 10 grand, pricey but manageable. Now it's 10 times that. But the math works out differently depending on who you are. Amazon and Google can pay the premium without breaking much of a sweat, but small startups and university labs, not so much. Critics warn that the result could be fewer foreign workers here at home and more US Companies forced to go overseas. And the biggest fear that in the race for innovation, America just hobbled itself.
- [36:48]
Bruce Hulsinger
And we're following some breaking news. The FTC says Amazon has agreed to pay an historic multi billion dollar lawsuit.
- [36:56]
Dina Temple-Raston
For tricking people into Amazon will pay 2.5 billion. That's right, billion with a B to settle claims it tricked customers into signing up for print prime and then made quitting it next to impossible. $1 billion will go to pay penalties and the other one and a half billion back to customers. If you were caught in the prime, I want to cancel Maze, the FTC says. You might see about 51 bucks. It's the agency's largest penalty of its kind and Amazon's defense that it did nothing wrong remains in intact. Still, they agreed to cut the check because, as the company put it, they'd rather move forward.
- [37:41]
Bruce Hulsinger
I had a very good talk with President Xi and we talked about TikTok.
- [37:46]
Dina Temple-Raston
That was Donald Trump explaining his sudden change of heart on TikTok. In his first term he tried to ban it. Now he's trying to broker its survival, crediting the app with helping him with win over young voters in 2024. Under the new plan, which has not yet been finalized. Oracle, Silver Lake, Rupert Murdoch and a host of other US Investors will control American user data, the content and apparently TikTok's algorithm, ByteDance, the app's Beijing based parent company, will keep a 20% stake in the company and maintain its US operations operations. According to NBC News, the algorithm will be retrained and American data will be stored here under constant monitoring. So TikTok gets to live on they just have a new landlord and finally Wall Street Meet Shiba Inu People signaled.
- [38:43]
Bruce Hulsinger
Their liking of the joke by buying Dogecoin. It's like this nihilistic gambling Remember Dogecoin.
- [38:51]
Dina Temple-Raston
The cryptocurrency that began as a joke? It now has its own exchange traded fund, meaning you can buy it from your brokerage account as easily as you might buy Apple stock. On its first day, there were nearly $18 million in trades. But here's the punchline. Dogecoin doesn't actually generate any revenue. It has no earnings, no cash flow. It's valid value. Like Meme Coins generally is all about its vibe. And under Trump's new crypto, friendly SEC vibes apparently are enough. Regulators have essentially said if investors want a Meme Coin in their retirement portfolio, have at it.
- [39:40]
Bruce Hulsinger
Foreign.
- [39:46]
Gary Marcus
Temple Raston, Sean Powers, Megan Dietrich, Zach Hirsch and me, Erica Gaeda. I was the lead producer. The episode was edited by Karen Duffin, Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum and contains original music by Ben Livingston with some other music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Rose Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough. Jesse Niswonger and Jake Cook do our sound design and engineering. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and PRX. Join us Friday as we continue our conversation about AI and ethics with NYU's Gary Marcus.
- [40:23]
Bruce Hulsinger
You have the reality that human beings tend to tune out after a while, and so they will tend, unfortunately, to give too much trust in the machines.
- [40:34]
Gary Marcus
That's Friday on Click Here. We'll see you then.
- [40:44]
Recorded Future News Announcer
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here, Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others, and you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.