And it's been a pleasant exchange on my end as well :)
That's simply not true. For example the Google bot decides every seconds if it wants to crawl this website or another one. I don't think you are up to date - might want to read up on "autonomous robotics". Many of the algorithms are so in nature that humans can not predict their results.
I think if you talk to robot builders they will tell you that the robots do stuff they weren't told to do all the time.
As for motivation, I don't think it is as magical as you presume it to be. We are not motivated to do arbitrary things - nature has motivated us to do certain things (think, learn, reproduce). So if we motivate a computer to do certain things (like crawl web site), why should it not count?
Anyway, I can see I am not going to be able to convince you of this and it is getting late so I cede to you.
But thank you for the interesting exchange.
An intelligent being (artificial or 'natural' makes no difference here) has free will and I believe (but can not prove) that eventually that leads to intelligence.
The prevailing belief here (certainly judging by the moderation ;) ) seems to be that you can algorithmically describe everything. I'm not sure that that is possible, neither am I sure that it is not.
But to date, nobody has designed a machine that on its own decide to go and do anything at all. Even the act of deciding to make a painting vs going out for lunch or talking to someone for an hour or two requires free will and intelligence. No computer in existence today can do that, and if there is not going to be some fundamental change in how computers work I doubt that one will do so in the future.
If you haven't read it yet look at the top of this discussion, rms has posted a link that makes for some very interesting reading on all this.
& thanks for the exchange, it has been educational, especially about the 'method' that could be abstracted from art.