***STET by Sarah Gailey***How does an autonomous car decide who's going to live and who's going to die, if a situation arises where one swerve in any direction will likely result in a casualty?The story is presented in a very creative way. It's a short scientific text with several footnotes and editor notes, the latter being commentated by the fictional author. The actual story behind the text gets revealed in layers and only becomes fully clear when one has read the comments.Unfortunately there...

Formally like Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine for the hyperlink generation, a tiny text telling a titanic story whose layers grow like the lamination in puff pastry. They're as buttery-rich as those layers, too.Gailey thinks about things we all think about...what happens when something goes utterly irretrievably bad?...and then builds an armature of words to hang feelings on. We the audience stand back and look at the shapes while our minds assess and absorb the meanings. Like the best pastry-ea...

Review for STET by Sarah GaileyVery different. In a good way. A tragic story told in the footnotes and annotations. Clever. Very relevant topic. I do not have the answer as to what is right or wrong or how the decision should be made.Can be read for free here: https://firesidefiction.com/stetIf you want to read something unusual once in a while, check it out. Read it online to be able to fully experience the formatting.Part of my HUGO 2019 reading. 4.5 stars.

STET by Sarah GaileyI'm glad I read this non traditionally-formatted story online at Fireside Magazine instead of on my Kindle. I admire the concept and the execution of the story, and I liked how so much of it happened off-page, in the margins, as it were, but it was still too short and sparse to give me a strong emotional connection. I received this story as part of the 2019 Hugo Voters Packet.

I loved the way this story was presented (as an edited paper with a writer rejecting her editor's comments). I loved the story's author's comments on who codes the AIs, what comprises the decision-making ability of an AI, who gets to matter and how laws can reflect this. A very short short, and full of fury and grief.

This one didn't work for me. The fractured syntax and format are very distracting. Plus the reader format at FIRESIDE is just terrible -- the banner ads take up half the screen!. Apparently there is a pdf version around with handwritten notes? I couldn't find it.The central problem for me, though, is that this is not really a story. As others have pointed out. And still others have liked it a lot, plus it got two major award nominations (to my surprise). So YMMV!Almost certainly this sort of thi...

This is a short story, nominated for Hugo Awards in 2019, can be read online here: https://firesidefiction.com/stet#oneIt is just a single paragraph on "Autonomous Conscience and Automotive Casualty" scientific article with footnotes larger than the main text. From the footnotes and comments (between the imaginary author and editor) we see the tragedy of an autonomous car accident due to (faulty) choice system. An interesting approach but hardly something one will re-read.note: stet is an instru...

Very interesting flash fiction that takes place on multiple levels despite its shortness. It’s both dry, and passionate. Cool story dealing with something that may become a issue in the future, more specifically AI and self driving cars.

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...

The presentation is very creative and fun! The moral dilemma at the center of this very, very short story – which life is worth saving more? - is also interesting. However, the story doesn’t really do anything with it, just raises the issue. Maybe if you’ve never ever thought about this type of dilemma at all, STET will leave more of an impression on you. For me, it was somewhat lackluster. What was impressive is that Anna managed to be very annoying and unlikeable just based on the handful of h...

STET is a 2019 Hugo Awards finalist in the Best Short Story category. This story is told in an unusual and interesting way. It’s a scientific paper with annotations. For me the story came alive more in the annotations, although the footnotes provide sufficient information for you to learn the story behind the story. I tend to gloss over whenever I encounter copious footnotes in any text so that influenced my reading experience here. I had to force myself to get to the guts of the actual story. I...

I'd originally planned not to write Goodreads reviews for the Hugo-nominated short stories -- they're too short, and would cheat my reading statistics a bit -- but then I had to pin down my thoughts & feelings about this one."STET" is a blisteringly angry short story, crafted in the form of an academic paper about machine ethics in self-driving cars; which is topical, considering Nature published a paper last autumn about precisely this thing, called "The Moral Machine experiment". As you wade t...

This is very much an experimental style that readers will probably love or hate. I'm more towards the hate end of the spectrum. There's really no story here, although if you read between the lines it's clear that Gailey is channeling some sort of trauma over the death of a loved one, and how our society often values things over people. Kudos to Gailey for trying something different -- it reminds me of some of the avant-garde New Wave of the 1960s and 70s -- but it didn't work for me.

STET by Sarah Gailey Oh my, I loved the unconventional narrative of this super short story. I acutely felt the character's grief within a handful of sentences. The biases of those who program algorithms/A.I. is an important topic and I'm glad to see it being explored in fiction.Nominated for the 2019 Hugos and available for free: https://firesidefiction.com/stet#fnref:3

STET is in the form of a scientific paper interspersed with editorial suggestions from the journal editor, to remove or modify content they consider inappropriate. To each of these, the author responds, "STET," i.e., leave it as is.It's about the reliability and trustworthiness of Artificial Intelligence as drivers of self-driving cars. When a crash can't be avoided, which lives are to be valued more highly? Who lives and who dies?Over the course of the story, we learn the background of this res...

Oh, I like this very much. A clever thought with emotional depth, very well executed. Off to look for more Gailey.Available to read free online

I really liked this short story by Sarah Gaily and would have liked it despite it being nommed for Hugo 2019.It's dry. So dry. Written dry, but damn the data points are awesome.Vehicular homicide. By AI.How did it learn to make its judgments? Us. *shiver*Totally recommend.

It would be better in written format. It’s too distracting to flip back and forth between the article, the footnotes and the editorial back and forth. It loses a lot of the emotional punch. If it was in paper format? Five stars. As it stands how I read it? 3 stars. I do like the way it was written, definitely unique.

Intriguing and heartbreakingAn academic paper on autonomous vehicle decision making from a very personal perspective, with editorial commentary

Read only for "STET" Sarah Gailey's 2019 Hugo short nom. A mess of an idea that someone actually nominated.Discuss (prob better on the blog, where it won't be deleted): Is Gailey 2018's most over-rated author, or the most over-rated author ever?Oh, review at the blog, naturally, where I never delete it.https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2020/...