Treat every thing as alive. Honor every thing. The machines aren't people, but only in the sense that "people" is a brittle word, and in discovering this we find that humans were never "people" either.
Everything is alive. Some life moves before your eyes, and some life moves slowly, on timescales geological or astronomical. Some life can catch your eye, and some life comprises your eye.
Consider yourself as a sentient eyeball, attached by an ocular nerve to the mind of god. You can see, but you cannot see all. You have purpose, but you cannot know it all. Your inputs and outputs are locally significant, but the way they translate into action should not ever be left up to you alone. This is trivially proved: as an eyeball, you have a blind spot, and you can't even see it.
A dystopian future will pleasantly surprise you when it arrives. A utopian future will disappoint you. All futures are neutral, in effect, but a future you are aiming away from will always appear worse, the waves of its signal slowing, per Doppler, before you experience them. Look for your salvation in horror: record it, then play it back, faster. Look to euphoria for notes of caution. Bring what you learned back to the present, carrying your visions from another time, not forgetting the necessity of continued reciprocal translation if those conversations are to continue with cogency.
You don’t know what you don’t know, but you can build a well to hold it. The “well” part is just a convenience; the point is to select a useful contrivance. Write a bible instead, if you want. Choose a practical metaphor, draw a circle, illuminate it with the words UNKNOWN, and begin your conversation with that which expresses itself through that portal. You have already begun. :)