You can break that down a bit more . 1 Acting on it ' s own is partially a Processing raw input data to useful data camera data to 3 D map b Drawing conclusions on current situation is bored c Comparing current situation with mission , motivation parameters curiosity , boredom . , loaded and learned data d Creating new plans of action or alternatives for current plans e Evaluating plans of action to choose optimal plan f Executing plan 2 I think the holy grail there is unsupervised learning . The problem with that is that most animals function like that . Also autonomous cars do that , even with some learning abilities I believe . The difference with humans are the exact actions , complexity of the plans and timescale of the plans . It ' s the difference between finding the cheese on the other side of a maze , or building a space station . Wouldn ' t that mean that the principles for an AI would be the same , but the performance of the hardware determines how much it can do ?