by Graeme Newman and the Machine

Why do we need rules? Who makes them? Who benefits from them? And what happens when we begin to question them?

Rules: An Argument with The Machine is a unique collection of short stories exploring one of the most fundamental features of human society: rules.

From ancient villages to futuristic cities, from courts of law to battlefields, from schools and prisons to utopian experiments, these stories examine the rules that govern our lives and the consequences of obeying, bending, or breaking them.

But this is more than a collection of stories.

Each story began as a collaboration between author Graeme Newman and an artificial intelligence. The Machine produced a story. The author responded, sometimes agreeing, often challenging, and occasionally mocking the machine's tendency toward optimism, redemption, and tidy moral conclusions. The result became an ongoing conversation about law, justice, power, morality, freedom, authority, conformity, and human nature itself.

As the stories unfold, a second narrative emerges:

• Can society exist without rules?

• Can rules exist without injustice?

• And can a machine ever understand the messy realities of human life?

Part philosophical inquiry, part social commentary, part literary experiment, Rules: An Argument with a Machine invites readers to join a lively debate between human skepticism and artificial optimism.

The stories may not provide definitive answers. But they ask questions worth arguing about.

In This Volume

• In the beginning: The origins of rules and morality

• The rise of rulers and authority

• Law, punishment, and social control

• Rule worshippers and rule breakers

• Utopias, dystopias, and "Ruletopia"

• The continuing dialogue between a human author and his machine co-author

For readers interested in social issues, criminal justice, political thought, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and the strange ways stories can illuminate the human condition.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.192.

By Harold J. Laski

I mean by liberty the absence of restraint upon the existence of those social conditions which, in modem civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness. I seek to inquire into the terms upon which it is attainable in the Western world, and, more especially, to find those rules of conduct to which political authority must conform if its subjects are, in a genuine sense, to be free. Already, therefore, I am maintaining a thesis. I am arguing, first, that liberty is essentially an absence of restraint. It implies power to expand, the choice by the individual of his own way of life without imposed prohibitions from without. Men cannot, as Rousseau claimed, be forced into freedom. They do not, as Hegel in- 1 LIBERTY IN THE MODERN STATE sisted, find their liberty in obedience to the law. They are free when the rules under which they live leave them without a sense of frustration in realms they deem significant. They are unfree whenever the rules to which they have to conform compel them to conduct which they dislike and resent. I do not deny that there are types of conduct against which prohibitions are desirable: I ought, for instance, to be compelled, even against my wish, to educate my children. But I am arguing that any rule which demands from me something I would not otherwise give is a diminution of my freedom.

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK AND LONDON, 1930, 295p.