Okay, I think I understand where we disagree. There isn’t a “why” either in biology or in the types of AI I’m talking about. In a more removed sense, a CS team at MIT said “I want this robot to walk. Let’s try letting it learn by sensor feedback” whereas in the biological case we have systems that say “Everyone who can’t walk will die, so use sensor feedback.”

But going further - do you think a gazelle isn’t weighing risks while grazing? Do you think the complex behaviors of an ant colony isn’t weighing risks when deciding to migrate or to send off additional colonies? They’re indistinguishable mathematically - it’s just that one is learning evolutionarily and the other, at least theoretically, is able to learn theoretically.

Is the goal of reproductive survival not externally imposed? I can’t think of any example of something more externally imposed, in all honesty. I as a computer scientist might want to write a chatbot that can carry on a conversation, but I, as a human, also need to learn how to carry on a conversation. Can we honestly say that the latter is self-directed when all of society is dictating how and why it needs to occur?

Things like risk assessment are already well mathematically characterized. The adaptive processes we write to learn and adapt to these environmental factors are directly analogous to what’s happening in neurons and genes. I’m really just not seeing the distinction.