Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are confusing utility functions with intelligence. All AIs need utility functions. An AI without a utility function would just do nothing. It would have no reason to beat Atari games, because it wouldn't get any reward for doing so. Even humans have utility functions. For example, we get rewards for having sex, or eating food, or just making social relationships with other humans. Or we have negative rein…
>> I think you are confusing utility functions with intelligence. No, what I'm really saying is that you can't have an autonomous agent that needs to be told what to do all the time. In machine learning, we train algorithms by giving them examples of what we want them to learn, so basically we tell them what to learn. And if we want them to learn something new, we have to train them again, on new data. Well, that's n…
There is also unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, which can take advantage of unlabelled data. Even supervised learning can work really well on weakly labelled data. E.g. taking pictures from the internet and using the words that occur next to them as labels. As opposed to hiring a person to manually label all of them.
I don't know what situation you are imagining that would make the AI "come back and cry". You will need to give an example.