Frank Riley 24 min read

'Cyber justice!' the District Attorney had thundered in his campaign speech, and Judge Anderson flings down the fax paper in disgust, facing the pledge to replace human judges with cybernetic ones.

Frank Riley's 1955 story is a thoughtful AI-and-social-SF tale of law and machine reason. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a story that pits the cold efficiency of a computer judge against the wisdom and mercy of the human bench, weighing what would be lost if we let the machines decide.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

24 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Paul Orban