This summer I read two books back to back — one fiction, one nonfiction — and they ended up talking to each other in a way I couldn't have planned. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger is a family drama about an autonomous vehicle accident and the AI-ethicist mother whose secret work sits at the center of it. Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick is the clear-eyed, cautiously optimistic case for engaging with AI as a co-worker, co-teacher, and coach. I used my Claude enabled book-club wheel widget to pull questions from both, and we get into culpability, cultural conditioning, the heat and chaos of this AI moment, and a very fun casting call — plus a real-time gut check on the Meta settlement news that broke the same week.

• Why this episode doubles as entry five of the AI for the Rest of Us series, and the identity growing pains behind that
• Book summaries: Culpability by Bruce Holsinger (fiction) and Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick (nonfiction)
• Why Mollick's framing — treating readers as intelligent tool-users rather than potential AI "idiots" — landed differently than most AI commentary
• The Meta settlement: the company's agreement to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit over addictive platform design and harm to young users, and what it might signal for coming AI regulation

• "I'm one of the good guys" — the culpability question at the heart of the novel: how much moral cover does good intent provide when you're the one building the tool.
• Mollick's core reminder from Co-Intelligence: today's AI models are the "worst" they will ever be — a line that cuts both ways, optimist or not.
• Weather and storm as recurring image in Culpability — oppressive heat driving knee-jerk, binary reactions to AI; the book's real ask is to look past output ("is it good or bad") toward where decisions are actually being made.

• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger (fiction, 2025)
• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick (nonfiction, 2024)