Yes, we can temporarily redefine goals and motivations for the sole purpose of this conversation, such that a thermostat has goals and motivations. But when we return to the real world, will this be helpful to us? Is that actually what we want from those words?

If we redefine goals and motivations this broadly, then AI is nothing new, because we've had technology with goals and motivations for hundreds if not thousands of years. And the world of the computer age is one big animist pantheon.

We could, but the way I read the dictionary, a goal doesn't require life, agency, or even autonomy by itself.

I think understanding goals or set points is a useful concept in control theory.

I don't think many technologies have had "motivations" before, though they have had "motivators", but that's something completely different :-P.

I'm not sure how you'd encode "improve this open source project" in earlier technologies.

I think it's reasonable to call that a type of motivation.

We call a robot arm an arm too, even if it's not made of meat.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goal [2] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/goal