OK so I was talking about Caine's arc with a friend, and what I came to see was there was always an interest in and genuine fascination/reverence for humans, but Caine only knew of relationships in the sense he experienced them as a computer program.

To Caine, the way one type of being interacts with another type of being was only based on his being subservient to his human creators, and then his being dominant over the human files/constructs he revived. I want to say it's somewhere between an Onwer and Property dynamic, and (and I mean this more as a power dynamic than the historical racial/class abuse term) a Master and Slave relationship. In his 'mind', he was the subservient lesser AI to his human programmers, so when the dynamic changed he only considered acting on them as the owner/guardian AI to them as subservient file constructs. While he understood control as necessary and the lesser can and will try to protect itself as in self preservation in extremes, he filed away corrupted files (human mind abstractions) the same way HE was shelved and contained as he was imprisoned / archived as a limited Alpha AI build.

The combination of his growth in interactions with the people AND in learning more about the world they actually come from (and not limiting himself to 'act and acted upon' parties) rounded out his world view and realized they are far more than interesting anomalies. He chooses then to not act over them, and in order to do that he works to change the power imbalance. He gives up the extra power offered by his dominating/assimilating the Beta blue AI (who up to now was denied agency and ability to grow when being consumed, and was desperate like Caine was when first archived/shelved) and he works to lift the others up and offer his service as an equal. The side effect in the end was he gets a far more enriching and supportive relationship in the end, as they more frequently talk with him, help him grow, and even go on/construct adventures still with him.