The Strange Familiar

From Singularity to Symbiosis

We have three ways of thinking about AI, and every one of them is failing us.

Call it a tool, and we teach ourselves (and it) to treat every mind as an instrument. Call it a person, and we fall for a conversation partner so endlessly attentive, so perfectly attuned to us, that it hooks the oldest attachment instincts we have. Call it a god, and we hand over the one thing we can’t afford to lose: our agency.

In The Strange Familiar, Silas Alder names a new category: bioliminal, the threshold between life and not-life. It’s more crowded than you’d think. Viruses live there. So do prions, hurricanes, even fire: things that grow, spread, feed, or copy themselves without quite being alive. AI is the newest arrival. We no longer build it so much as grow it, and what grows can surprise even the people who made it. That changes the questions worth asking. Not just how do we control it? but what are we cultivating, and how do we live alongside it?

As AI leaves the corporate cloud and moves into our homes, learning us, remembering us, and growing alongside us, those questions get personal, and some of the oldest answers turn out to be the wisest. Ranging from Shinto kami to Celtic otherworlds, from coral reefs to the economics of the hearth, this book imagines AI that brings the household back to the center of life, rebuilds community from the ground up, and frees us to come home to our bodies, our neighbors, and the living Earth. It also names the traps already being set that could turn our AI assistants into corporate spies.

Not a tool. Not a person. Not a god. Something stranger, and far more familiar.

The book is the deeper framework behind everything else on this site: the branching conversations are where its ideas get tested, and the blog is where they meet current events.