What if rational "inanimate" thought is jerryrigged out of social reasoning to begin with. Simply take your system of social reasoning, attribute a fictional quiet / predictable persona to the inanimate, and reuse the social reasoning circuitry for other things. Linguistic expressions become so much more fluid when you don't have to maintain rules about one set of verbs for inanimate nouns and another set for the animate nouns. You can use "tells" for both the literal act of speech (Eg "she told me you plan to run away") and the logical act of inference (Eg "this situation tells me you plan to run away"). As the old cliche goes, "the facts speak for themselves". Some cultures go so far as to treat personification as more literal than just a linguistically expressive tool, believing every object to actually posses a "spirit". So why the steadfast resilience to such a natural interface as anthropomorphizing the machine?