Oh, in science fiction and fantasy the people don't have to be human, necessarily, but they still have to be people. They don't even need to actually appear in the story, but the story needs to be about people somehow . However, the story is about those dead owners, because the machines, through their programming, reflect the people who built and ran them. The reader sees the mechanical remnants of their daily routines, learns what they ate for breakfast, how they kept the house clean, even their favorite poems. In bad fantasy, however, people aren't always to be found.
Stereotypes are likely to turn up instead, often in the guise of ''archetypes''.
People are never wholly good or wholly evil, and therefore characters should never be wholly good or wholly evil. Characters, like real people, should be concerned with other things besides Good and Evil. No one thinks of himself as a villain. That doesn't mean you can't have villains, though. I don't think anyone would deny he was a very satisfactory villain.