My work as an early leader in the Amazon Alexa project brought me close to the growing field of machine learning. I became certain that computers would mimic human intelligence to an astonishing degree, and though AI in fiction is a well-treaded territory, I found myself wanting to talk about technology that was closer to reality than the omnipotent Skynet. I imagined an imperfect, alien intelligence that wouldn’t have predictable motives or airtight reasoning. That’s what I saw in Amazon’s nascent electronic brain, and that’s what makes realistic AI so ripe for storytelling.