Humans have the drive to go about because of a body that has various demands. And with every doing, humans accumulate Ego which again helps their drive to learn, explore, do stuff or define their behaviour. Humans are self-learning systems. The rewards and penalty are also self-created. Unless general AI systems start to model the above which creates self-learning, they will be just specific systems with a tiny aspec…
You don't need to program Ego to program a drive to learn new things, just a procedure to calculate the expected value of new information from engaging in some candidate training activity.
Self-learning is brought about by Ego. Reward / penalty is self determined or determined by environment. Without self-learning capability which lets humans to learn on their own with the limitations imposed by environment, by their Ego, by their body, which is driven by survival, whatever the AI learns has to be taught in someway by training, by reward/penalty imposed by us. Then it will be always a poor limited imitation of humans. Not a intelligent being.