My dog loves to play with his toy snake by repeatedly breaking its neck. He prefers traveling on the top of London buses so he can see what’s happening in the world, and he obsessively checks pee-mails and sex-messages from other dogs as we walk around the neighborhood.

His seriousness about all these deeply silly things makes me imagine how a superior intelligence might patronize pet humans, keeping us entertained in a captivity we were barely even aware of while chuckling at our antics.

There are three main ways we imagine encountering a truly novel intelligence: another known species in a different genus or kingdom (dolphin, octopus); alien intelligence; or native, sentient artificial intelligence. And while we worry and invent nightmares about killer machines, predatory aliens, and creatures turning on humans, we also dream of bridging the cosmic loneliness as the only entities we know of who can hold a proper conversation. “No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved,” but in some of our imaginings, A.I. can and does see us and hold us in mind in the precise ways we crave but can never satisfy.

Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age is set in a nanotechnology future branched off from Victorian tech and East India Company–style globalization. It features an interactive book, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: A Propædeutic Enchiridion, in Which Is Told the Tale of Princess Nell and Her Various Friends, Kin, Associates, which falls into the hands of an impoverished four-year-old named Nell. The lady’s primer becomes Nell’s teacher, mother, friend, and confidante and ultimately guides the child from a vast, global underclass into becoming a person of great account. You read the novel, yearning to be read by it in turn as Nell’s book reads and loves her. A key subplot is how to deliver this kind of fruitful cherishing at scale to all the world’s children.

So many fictional “deep A.I.” are the family, friends, and lovers we can neither have nor be. The vast, native A.I. in Iain M. Banks’ series of Culture novels are wholly believable intelligences that effortlessly task-switch between interstellar travel on ships the size of planets, terraforming, poetry, multidimensional galactic warfare, and reminding the protagonist that it really is time for him to pee. Ian McDonald’s novel 2047: River of Gods has sentient A.I. inhabit and extend the personas of Hindu gods while being ruthlessly hunted by “Krishna Cops.” Becky Chambers’ novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet includes a ship’s A.I. called Lovelace, who truly loves and is loved. When something happens to her, it really feels like someone has died.

What they all have in common is that, for fictional purposes, these A.I. feel real—not only as real as the other characters in their stories, but latently true in the way of things we need but that don’t yet exist. They’re real enough to yearn for the way some people longed to live in James Cameron’s Avatar — with that almost-able-to-touch-it sense of something that isn’t here but really, really should be.