Don't get me wrong, a machine can achieve goals is really, really useful. After all, chess playing programs use the AlphaBeta algorithm to prune future positions intelligently, but to score the positions they still need human input. It may be, however, that they infer their OWN rules from past positions, with absolutely no human input. Then it becomes interesting. Still, the initial rules of the chess game have to be set down.
So while this is intelligence, this is not sentience.