The Household Chief

The strength of The Household Chief is that it refuses to flatter its own subject. Bennett builds the book on a clear division of labour. Noticing, planning and doing are three different jobs, and the first two are what wear people down. He then sorts household work into what an agent can hold, what is shared, and what stays human: meals, cleaning, driving, caring, and deciding who owns which job. That last list is a real act of restraint for an author selling an AI product. "It does not cook, it does not hug anyone, and it should not decide who in your family does the dishes."

The substance sits in the failures, and Chapter 5 is the best of them. A question as small as "Did I feed the dog?" goes wrong three ways: the agent looks at a camera instead of the sensor, the sensor list truncates at one hundred devices while the house has 169, and a motion sensor silently misses a person at the food bin. Each failure yields a rule that applies well beyond dogs. "Remember this" must mean saved. Ask how old the answer is. A button that records beats a sensor that guesses. The "No one gets to say 'nothing was done' when something was" story in Chapter 10 earns its place as the book's real thesis: an agent must report what actually happened.

The book's discipline is its virtue. Every chapter ends in an exercise that works with a notebook, and the closing rules page collects what the house learned. Duncan's afterword is dry and a little funny. "Mika has been fed" is a good last line. This is practical, candid, usable non-fiction that treats readers as adults.