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A review by trish204
Fireside Magazine Issue 60, October 2018 by Julia Rios, Danilo Campos
3.0
This is the review for the short story STET by Sarah Gailey.
The author and I didn't have a nice first encounter - she wrote a novelette with a great premise that completely fell flat for me. Unfortunately, something very similar happened here.
This is an article with footnotes as well as links and editor's comments on the side. It depicts an incident involving an autonomous (self-driving) car that made a fateful decision.
Self-driving cars are quite the hot topic right now. Personally, considering all the maniacs behind the wheel, the growing egotism of the drivers, the still increasing numbers of drunken drivers and all the other stuff that can and often does happen to you on the road, I wouldn't mind if the cars drove themselves like in those wonderful scifi stories of old (though a part of me would also mourn the good old days of driving as I like fast cars). However, the technology necessary for that needs to be sophisticated and well-engineered and even then there would be errors. It's unavoidable.
...
Funny, isn't it?! How we demand perfection from a machine despite us humans being so far from that same perfection. If you look at the numbers, even if car accidents decreased by only a fourth, that would already be a win for everyone. But I bet that wouldn't be enough. After the first accident, people would be coming with pitchforks and torches and demands no human could ever fulfill or has ever fulfilled. What a sad joke.
Anyway, in this story, self-driving cars are a reality, the one in this story is a Toyota. And it made a mistake. Or a decision most humans wouldn't have made. So we are talking about a casualty, about the people learning about this from the news as well as those directly, personally, involved. And as these things go, you have the objective view on things and you have the highly emotionally charged look.
But then we get another data point: those wo taught the AI. It is, true to its name, still artificial after all. So what it did was based on matrices programmed into it by humans. Does that make it homicide? Can we really be neutral in a discussion about this issue, especially considering who the victim in this story was?!
I feel torn about the presentation of this story. On one hand, it's pretty unique (not entirely but it's also not done too often). On the other hand, all the constant links and sidenotes pulled me out of the story's flow so I was more annoyed by the emotionally charged comments left and right than emotionally effected.
Still ... I liked it.
You can read it for free here: https://firesidefiction.com/stet
The author and I didn't have a nice first encounter - she wrote a novelette with a great premise that completely fell flat for me. Unfortunately, something very similar happened here.
This is an article with footnotes as well as links and editor's comments on the side. It depicts an incident involving an autonomous (self-driving) car that made a fateful decision.
Self-driving cars are quite the hot topic right now. Personally, considering all the maniacs behind the wheel, the growing egotism of the drivers, the still increasing numbers of drunken drivers and all the other stuff that can and often does happen to you on the road, I wouldn't mind if the cars drove themselves like in those wonderful scifi stories of old (though a part of me would also mourn the good old days of driving as I like fast cars). However, the technology necessary for that needs to be sophisticated and well-engineered and even then there would be errors. It's unavoidable.
...
Funny, isn't it?! How we demand perfection from a machine despite us humans being so far from that same perfection. If you look at the numbers, even if car accidents decreased by only a fourth, that would already be a win for everyone. But I bet that wouldn't be enough. After the first accident, people would be coming with pitchforks and torches and demands no human could ever fulfill or has ever fulfilled. What a sad joke.
Anyway, in this story, self-driving cars are a reality, the one in this story is a Toyota. And it made a mistake. Or a decision most humans wouldn't have made. So we are talking about a casualty, about the people learning about this from the news as well as those directly, personally, involved. And as these things go, you have the objective view on things and you have the highly emotionally charged look.
But then we get another data point: those wo taught the AI. It is, true to its name, still artificial after all. So what it did was based on matrices programmed into it by humans. Does that make it homicide? Can we really be neutral in a discussion about this issue, especially considering who the victim in this story was?!
I feel torn about the presentation of this story. On one hand, it's pretty unique (not entirely but it's also not done too often). On the other hand, all the constant links and sidenotes pulled me out of the story's flow so I was more annoyed by the emotionally charged comments left and right than emotionally effected.
Still ... I liked it.
You can read it for free here: https://firesidefiction.com/stet