"It has to be able to recognize an external force or event that could cause the above to take place. It has to be able to recognize that it has the ability to identify such a threat, consider the options available to avoid that threat, and if possible, choose and execute that best option in order to try to avoid the impending injury or death."
We have to make sure too much isn't baked into 'recognize' and 'choose', since there's plenty of evidence that this doesn't even typically happen in humans in fearful sorts of situations (avoidance responses often occur before the nerve signals even get to the frontal cortex; many explanations of why one did what they did in fear situations are well established to be after-the-fact rationalizations rather than an account of what actually went on in their heads. When you touch a hot stove and pull your hand back, your brain is not consulted; nerve impulses don't travel that fast. But that's a classic danger avoidance response.).
I don't see that as a "danger avoidance response" at all. I see it as a response to immediate pain via the autonomic nervous system. Just like the brain isn't consulted to breath or have the heart beat, the body responds to pain without forethought.
In that line of thought, I believe that too much intelligence in animals is pushed real hard to be defined as being "instinct" rather than a processed decision based on stimulus and circumstance. I think it would be difficult to give a black and white definition of what exactly is instinct, that animals exhibit, and the reasoned, thoughtful reaction in a human being. And then there comes the question as to whether human beings can exhibit genuine "instinct", whatever that definition may be.
There's also a problem with danger-avoidance responses in systems that we probably don't want to accept are sentient. The reason my oven won't run above 550 degrees could be because it fears starting a fire if it gets hotter; that's exactly the reason the human designer capped it at that temp, so if we suppose that the human designer is sentient because of the fear of a fire then we have to accept the same about the oven (it isn't fair to say that the oven is just doing this because of a handful of switches, because the human designer is just a bunch of switches too, just really complex ones).
Hmm, I don't believe that intelligence can bequeathed to a device merely by the design and construction by a true intelligence. There has to be more to it than that. By that definition, if I build a dog house, wouldn't that be intelligent too? Intelligent because it CHOOSES to be a dog house?
Putting a thermostatic safety switch in an oven doesn't create an artificial intelligence in that oven It is a hardwired trigger that has no processing necessary in order to activate. Simple on/off switch based on the temperature it detects. Now if that oven had processing power to be able to detect when the apple pie was done to perfection, and at peak flavor, as well as turning off the heat and notifying the cook the dinner can be served and the pie will be cooled down enough to meet the deadline of an imminent dessert treat, perhaps even bringing it out to the dinner table at the correct time, well, then maybe we are getting somewhere with AI.
But of course, intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is really nothing more than a bunch of switches, but not just digital on/off switches, but also variable analog inputs and outputs that can be partial values between on or off. I guess the firing of neurons in the brain could be considered in this light, and in most respects considered as both analog and digital. So how many of those switches raise the complexity bar to where the "entity" housing them becomes self aware and continuously self programming? And who decides that level? Suppose an artificial intelligence is created that chooses to NOT reveal itself? What then?
