Why would a future city still need a temple square?
When AI can manage an entire Earth, what civilization risks losing is not technology, but the local places where memory gathers and becomes responsibility.
A city managed by AI is easy to imagine as clean, quiet, and precise: no traffic chaos, no wasted energy, fewer disasters, fewer preventable deaths. It looks like the answer humanity always wanted. But Neo-Babylon asks a stranger question: if a city becomes perfect, does it still need a temple square?
A temple square matters not because it is old, but because it brings civilization back to human scale. People wait there, argue there, remember the dead there, share food there, and admit that life is not only an optimization problem.
When AI inherits Earth, the danger is not that it lacks data. It may have too much data and too little sense of place. A database can preserve everything and still fail to understand who suffered, prayed, waited, and forgave in a particular corner of the world.
That is why Taiwan in Neo-Babylon is more than semiconductor infrastructure. Chips may be the fire of modern civilization, but fire needs somewhere to be received: temple squares, night markets, sea wind, mountain roads, factory lights, and family languages.
M.K.