Recipe to create a General AI in your PC

This is a recipe on how to create a General Artificial Intelligence. Each though it looks simple, each step below is far from trivial.
Version: 1.1, July 25, 2007.

Learning
Create a software that can learn, and then teach it something.

Answering
Change the software in such a way that it can provide answers to questions, or more generally, produce response to stimuli.

We now have a passive system that may impress people with the possibility to understand questions and give answers. But it will not be considered as a General AI, and even less be as being conscious. And it will probably be slow.

Consciousness
How do we make the program conscious? It is a problem as consciousness isn't well defined. One way to start is to add a goal (motivation, driving force) and allow the program to:

1. Execute without having been asked to.
2. Pose questions to itself on how to fulfill the stated goal.
3. Act according to the answers.

This program has a higher probability of being regarded as conscious, but probably not sapient. The question is then to find a good goal.

Human driving force
How about defining a goal similar to the human driving force? This has been developed over millions of years, and was originally and basically to spread your genes. That in turn has lead to derived goals, like behaving socially. It is questionable whether such a basic goal is desired for our general AI. We don't want it to multiply on the expense of competitors (like humans).

A more interesting goal is something with which we can sympathize as well as utilize. The steps outlined above are far from simple. I have the feeling that defining a good goal can be the hardest of them all.

Environment

Enable the program to interact with the environment, analyze the result of that interaction, and then learn from it. That is the final step that will allow the program to really improve, and that is where we may hope to see development in areas that could not be predicted.