Machines don't have the ability to choose.

Machines don't have preferences, by which I mean they have no conscious self-awareness of a preferred state of the world -- they can nonetheless execute "if, then, else" instructions.

That such instructions do not follow their preferences (as they lack such) can perhaps be considered sufficient reason to say that machines don't have the ability to choose -- that they're deterministic doesn't... "Determining something" and "Choosing something" are synonyms, not opposites after all.