Well, shooting randomly at a distant target is more likely to produce a bulls-eye than not shooting at all, even though you're almost certainly going to miss (and probably shoot yourself in the foot while you're at it). It's probably better to try to find a way to take off that blindfold. As you suggest, we don't yet understand intelligence, so there's no way we're going to make an intelligent machine without either significantly improving our understanding or winning the proverbial lottery.

"Programming is the art of figuring out what you want so precisely that even a machine can do it." - Some guy who isn't famous