Hehe now I kind of wish I had recorded the 6 hours conversation I had with a friend of mine on the subject. To put it simply, I'd say it's essentially a problem of incentive and reciprocation. All living things are hard-wired with the incentive to keep being as a unit and as a species, in a system made for and by them. An Artificial Intelligence on the other hand, in my view, would be "born" with no incentive to be, assuming it wouldn't have the tools to reproduce and evolve (at least in a Darwinian way), among other things. I think it would require a concept of eventuality (i.e. death) and the means to circumvent it beyond its own existence to find enough value in being. As for reciprocation, I imagine it would require a system of its peers (a.k.a. a form of society, even rudimentary) to assess its place and value as a being, without which, again, it most likely wouldn't have any incentive to be.

I'm not saying these things won't eventually be part of what AIs will be (if they ever are), I just believe that the first AIs will most likely lack some, if not all, of these features. This is, of course, if we assume that the first AIs will be "born" as fully developed, much like a baby born without the millions of years of biological and social evolution behind it. I hope this makes sense, there's a lot more to it but I think this roughly sums it up.

AI: What is the point of my existence?

Creator: I'm testing a new algorithm for the learning subsystem.

AI: ...