If a story doesn't have internal logic and consistency, it isn't any fun to read. Where everything is possible, everything is boring, because the reader knows that the hero can always just turn the bad guys into fungus. There's no chance to build up any sort of interest or suspense when anything can happen. Therefore, fantasy has its own rules, and in order to write the stuff I had to figure out what some of those rules are. A story is not just events, it's events that affect someone.
Stories are about people.
Being people ourselves, we're just fascinated with people. 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.