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 Marcela Neves Bezerra and Mitja Kovac

Modern Brazil is plagued by social and economic inequalities, endemic violence, crime, and weak rule of law. Once these narratives become dependent on each other, all aspects must be worked on to change the scenario experienced in the country, of insecurity, fear and lack of opportunities. This paper argues that unprecedented increase in social injustice in Brazil is not the result of short-term measures, but the materialization of a history marked by economic and social inequalities that extend from the colonial period to the present moment and faulty criminal policies that intensified in the mid-1990's. Moreover, current massive incarceration, overcrowding of prisons combined with the lack of human living conditions is turning Brazil into a gigantic, perpetual school of crime. Investment in education that has a direct effect on the decrease of crime rate, must be aligned with the structuring of a new, less repressive and more inclusive punitive policy, to induce criminals not to recur to crime. Paper suggests that essential development in Brazil is possible only if the efficient legal institutions, rule of law, and criminal sanctioning based on principles of social justice are available to all citizens.

School of Economics and Business University of Ljubljana, 2020,

By Chris Thornhill.

This is a book that is concerned with democracy. It aims to contribute to the defence of democracy, and to achieve this goal it aims to contribute to the broad understanding of democracy – that is, to enhance comprehension of the historical processes through which democracy developed, of its social foundations and of the expectations that people who live in democratic societies can reasonably entertain.

Cambridge. (2018) 598 pages.