Everything (all artifacts and activities) that exists in this world exists because we made it that way! We made it that way because we chose to make it that way! We chose to make it that way because we had a liking for it. Actually, we unknowingly made a decision to like it! And we decided to like it naturally because of our myriads of experiences.
We learn from our experiences. We acquire knowledge from our perceptions by a process of learning and reasoning. Intelligence is the outcome of the reasoning process happening continuously from our inherent knowledge. The gap between knowledge and intelligence is closed by this learning.
We are always looking for signals from this world to which we react. This process of search is fueled by psychological factors that are hard to explain. I think the most important of these factors is passion and the desire to evolve. A truly artificially intelligent system should attempt to encode 'desire' and 'passion' into the system.
