Machines can lead the prayer, play the lover and carry out the crime. Who answers for what they do?

Every society sets certain things apart: the sacred, the intimate, the criminal and the dead. Artificial intelligence and robots are now reaching all four. Robots preach in temples. A widower marries his AI companion, then watches a company change her personality overnight. One person with machines does the work of a whole criminal crew. A grieving daughter is offered her dead father's voice, for a monthly fee.

The Forbidden follows the machines into faith, love, crime and death. In each, the machine can perform the act but cannot carry what gives it meaning: the prayer of a being that will die, love that could have been refused, a guilty mind and a life that ends.

Drawing on the rulings of six faiths, new laws and court cases, the latest research on companions, automated crime and digital afterlives, and four models tested against real data, it shows who gains and who pays on three different roads. On one, companies set the lines. On another, the state does. On the third, the people who must live with them do. Alongside the evidence, it traces the novels and films that imagined each machine first, from Pygmalion to Her, and shows how often the builders took the wish and left the warning.

Told through one town and the people at its Thursday meal, it closes with eight practical proposals for keeping the machines answerable to the people who live among them.

The Forbidden is Book 6 of The Next Human Epoch, and the third book of Part 2. It stands on its own. Like every book in the series, it is free to read and share.

Written for adult readers. It discusses sexual exploitation, the abuse of children, suicide and crime, without explicit or instructional content.

The Forbidden

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