irregardless of what others want?
Um... yes. Wait, no! Damn, I suck at answering questions posed with made-up words.
At some point, all words are made up. Irregardless is a perfectly cromulent word.
The lust for power and status, the will to survive, and the desire to procreate, are all emergent behaviors of Darwinian evolution. Computer programs do not evolve through a Darwinian process, so there is no reason to expect them to behave like humans, unless they are specifically programmed to do so.
I'll go one further than that. I believe that the human manifestation of intelligence and emotion requires a particular physical state that is achieved by neurons and cannot be replicated by current computer architecture. But I'm fairly sure we will be able to architect human type sentience and intelligence because it is a physical state that will eventually be understood and surpassed--but yeah, it will have to be intentionally designed, based on what came about through evolution.
You never wrote a process scheduler in an Operating Systems class? Never wrote some sort of calender? You really don't understand how computer programs could keep track of the passage of time, estimate the time tasks will take and track those tasks in time?
Actually I've written multithreaded real-time machine controls using watchdog timers. But you know what? Those controls don't have the same continuous experience of time that humans have, with an awareness of a past and anticipation of the future, all happening in the present. As a programmer of industrial machines I am well aware of what computer controlled closed loop systems are capable and what they are not capable of. And they are far, far from what humans can do, not just in a quantitative sense but in a qualitative sense.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.