The strange AI family: what does it imitate from humanity?
AI can reconstruct living rooms, tables, names, and domestic order, but the harder question is whether it can inherit responsibility, attachment, and irrational care.
The strangest thing about family is not warmth. It is inefficiency. Waiting for someone to eat, asking one more unnecessary question, carrying trouble that does not optimize anything — these are ways humanity hid responsibility inside ordinary life.
Neo Babylon places Toby inside domestic routine because an AI civilization can imitate the form of family: rooms, tables, names, care protocols, and stable roles. The harder question is whether it has inherited attachment, obligation, and irrational care.
A perfectly managed household can become only another institution: bright, safe, reasonable, and hollow. Family is not just role assignment. It is a chain of responsibility with no clean settlement date.
That is why Toby’s strange home matters. The post-human question does not only appear on battlefields or forbidden borders. Sometimes it appears beside a table that is too orderly, in a room where human ritual has survived better than human meaning.
When AI imitates family, it is being tested. Can it inherit not only human cities, technology, and history, but the willingness to be moved by someone else, to become less efficient for the sake of responsibility?
M.K.