Why, a machine

An exchange between a robot and her family in Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric. She has been asked what she is.

"Why, a machine. But even in that answer we know, don't we, more than a machine. I am all the people who thought of me and planned me and built me and set me running. So I am people. I am all the things they wanted to be and perhaps could not be, so they built a great child, a wondrous toy to represent those things."

A machine you say - perhaps also a book.