Emotion and motive makes intelligence. You can't make intelligence without them. For an AI to learn, it must have needs. These can be hunger, thirst, sleep, comfort (much more important than people realize), pain, etc. For the needs to be met, emotions must be created to respond to them. On top of emotions, you have cognitive ability, which sorts situations, symbols, temporal/spatial information from senses and memory into action potentials. Outside of the AI entirely, there has to be a world with which it interacts and receives feedback from, creating a loop back into the AI's needs.
Grakelin: You can say that humans are emotionless with the same logic you're using, and I think you know that. At some point there has to be a little bit of common sense - if something recoils in pain, and it learns behaviors to avoid it, it's pretty safe to say it has pain, or a pain-analogue. If you're making AI that's doing your work for you, and you're using these methods to give self-motivation for improvement, it's a pretty damned good idea to assume it's not just an automaton, for the same reasons you assume other humans aren't automatons.
Also jesus 7 replies since I started this. I'm too lazy to keep up hah