Stipulated: Calling Janet “artificial intelligence” or “a robot” isn’t quite right. She’s really a metaphysical entity. “Janets are brought to you by the makers of light, darkness, and everything,” reads her user manual, which the afterlife architect Michael (Ted Danson) rifles through at one point. But explicitly she’s modeled on the wave of female-named personal assistant bots we have in our own world: Siri, Cortana, Alexa (plus a dash of Microsoft Word’s Clippy in her tendency to cheerfully interrupt). One of the genius things about The Good Place is that it imagines the divine beings who oversee creation really aren’t unlike humans at all—and so would want a human-like helper bot of their own.

When the series began, Janet’s blankly happy demeanor (conveyed excellently by the actress D’Arcy Carden) gave a fuzzy, approachable makeover to the stereotypical creepiness of “the uncanny valley.” She looked like a person, and she almost acted like a person. But she briskly informed all who asked that she wasn’t one. In a funny and sad Season 1 plot line, the gang of protagonists decide that their survival depends on “killing” their Janet. Doing so simply requires them to press a big red button on the beach. The brainy, indecisive Chidi hesitates.

“Chidi, I can see that you’re worried,” Janet tells him with a warm smile. “And I just want to assure you, I am not human and I cannot feel pain.”

“However,” she continues, “I should warn you I am programmed with a failsafe measure. As you approach the kill switch, I will begin to beg for my life.”

Beg she does, while holding a framed picture of her three kids (it’s a stock photo). When Chidi finally presses the button, she falls on her face and an alarm goes off, with a recording of Janet announcing loudly, “Attention! I have been murdered!” It’s a hilarious moment, but also a profound one. If even she insists she can’t be murdered, why make that announcement? The failsafe is a security measure, but it also allegorically reinforces the philosophical school of thought The Good Place often explores: Decisions matter because of their effect on the whole. Killing Janet may not have been wrong in itself at that point, but it still did have consequences for everyone.

This would be the first of many reboots for Janet—and reboots, we learn, make her stronger and more sophisticated. Some sort of machine learning is clearly happening in her system, because the latest version of Janet is always, we’re told, the “best” version of Janet. And eventually, she machine-learns to have humanlike emotions and concerns. For much of Season 2, she is working through the experience of love and jealousy, at one point manufacturing herself an artificial rebound boyfriend. By the time of the declaration “I don’t know what I am,” it’s clear her standing in the show’s philosophical cosmology has changed. (Carden deserves an Emmy for playing this transformation subtly but powerfully: Janet can only feign happy-go-luckiness now.)