Bruce Holsinger > Quotes

“Insidious, these false versions of superiority and ease we project onto other families: how often they blind us to the surer comforts of our own.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“You’ll be a lot less obsessed with what people think of you when you understand how infrequently they do.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“You must convince your readers that your characters are flesh and blood rather than words on dead skin, that their loves and hatreds and passions are as deep and present as the readers' own. Your task is to delight, to pleasure, to lift your reader to another sphere of being and then strand him there, floating above the earth and panting for more lines.”
― Bruce Holsinger, A Burnable Book

“A blessing, to know the talents and limitations of those closest to you, what they’re capable of and what they aren’t. One kind of friend who will spend hours sifting through your psyche; another who will sacrifice half a day to scrubbing your toilets.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

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

“And this, I propose, is the inhuman soul of the algorithm. It may think for us, it may work for us, it may organize our lives for us. But the algorithm will never bleed for us. The algorithm will never suffer for us. The algorithm will never mourn for us. In this refusal lies the essence of its moral being.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Friends are the siblings God never gave us.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

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

“When humans do something wrong, they generally face consequences. Even when our wrongdoing goes undetected by another—a parent, a spouse, an institution, law enforcement—we tend to experience guilt, shame, or regret. Only a psychopath lives life free of remorse. Algorithms face no such consequences for their misbehavior, either societal or emotional. Punishment, guilt, culpability are alien to them. There are no moral qualms in an algorithm. Yet without acknowledgment of wrongdoing, how can there be regret? Without self-consciousness of guilt, how can there be remorse? And without regret and remorse, how can there be moral growth? —Lorelei Shaw, Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I know Charlie is right, I know I need to let those fantasies go. But I can’t help my reaction, will never escape the churn of dreams, mistakes, regrets, and terrors that is fatherhood. No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

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

“When humans do something wrong, they generally face consequences. Even when our wrongdoing goes undetected by another—a parent, a spouse, an institution, law enforcement—we tend to experience guilt, shame, or regret. Only a psychopath lives life free of remorse.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“It’s a real shame. It’s just not about the kids anymore.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“The drone rises above the trees, makes a few lazy spirals in the air, and hovers there over the edge of the pond, the little boy fully in control, for now.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

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

“In a 1946 lecture on the problem of free will, Jean-Paul Sartre issued his famous pronouncement that “man is condemned to be free.” But how can freedom be condemnation? Because, Sartre avows, man “did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Parents always want to manage the narrative instead of letting kids write their own.” She clapped a hand over her mouth.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“I am the stolid husband who buys two beds and two sets of sheets so his wife can get enough sleep, who trains his children to line up their shoes and put the dishes in the cabinets a certain way so their mother won’t have to rearrange things after them, who orders the messy world below so her great mind can soar like an eagle above the fray.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Man is ever blind to his own faults, but fox-quick at perceiving those of others.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Invention of Fire

“Because success in life didn’t just happen. Things didn’t always work out, no matter where or how you were raised.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“Love can be sustaining even in the worst of circumstances. Bare life, though, can be passing hard to endure”
― Bruce Holsinger, A Burnable Book

“I decide not to push.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“With his charisma, power, intellect, and depthless wealth, he is a radiant sun pulling at these people with a gravitational force that keeps them all, including Lorelei, in his orbit.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“They can be so bitchy and sneaky and competitive sometimes, like about who’s going to more parties or whose kid is busier or whatnot, especially my mom. But even when they’re stabbing each other in the back, they know how to help you through things, you know?”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“It can be terrifying, how precise and exacting she gets in this analytic mode, when I become the exposed object of her focus, as if a razor knife has snicked through me, leaving my body and brain slashed by a thousand cuts.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Another when the system will confront a split-second choice between striking a child on a bike and colliding with a bus full of senior citizens. And another”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Empathetic dysfunction, her therapists call it, a sometimes debilitating response to an overload of impersonal but negative information. Lorelei has a way of assuming the pain of distant others and wearing it as a mantle, like the old quilt covering her now.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“We live in an immense world, whole universes of taste and touch and scent, of voices commingling in the light, and dying away with the common dread that stands at every man’s door. Yet we perceive and remember this world only as it creates those single fragments of experience: moments of everyday kindness, or self-sacrificing love, or unthinkable brutality. I”
― Bruce Holsinger, A Burnable Book

“By now Morrissey has circled the lot. Her sedan slows at the stop sign fronting the main road. One of her taillights is cracked, a detail that gives me an unkind flicker of amusement. She lifts her phone and scowls at the screen as she types: driving directions, a takeout food order on an app, maybe a text. The phone remains in her raised hand as she pulls out onto the boulevard, where she guns the engine and shoots away, an angry bullet in the sun.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability