We have some things to look at that give us clues. So-called 'genetic' programming/evolutionary computing gives us results that were not designed. It seems like

We have some things to look at that give us clues. So-called 'genetic' programming/evolutionary computing gives us results that were not designed. It seems likely to me that true machine intelligence would recognize the value of iteratively finding optimal solutions rather than trying to design with intent. I have to think it would also be vastly more efficient at re-use, which we recognize as a good idea but in practice aren't very good at. Gene-swapping between organisms in nature is rampant. A nice example of how 'alien' the results can be is experiments that have been done designing hardware circuits with this type of approach. Results have included designs that were difficult to comprehend at first glance, including features that were not connected to other parts of the circuitry but upon removal caused the rest the the chip to not work correctly. (It was figured out but explanation is beyond the scope of a discussion here).