The title of this article did it's job in piquing my interest. Though I feel author didn't go into as much detail as I would've liked, the central point is still interesting.

I suspect that this basic imperative of bodily survival in an uncertain world is the basis of the flexibility and power of human intelligence. But few AI researchers have really embraced the implications of these insights. The motivating drive of most AI algorithms is to infer patterns from vast sets of training data – so it might require millions or even billions of individual cat photos to gain a high degree of accuracy in recognising cats. By contrast, thanks to our needs as an organism, human beings carry with them extraordinarily rich models of the body in its broader environment. We draw on experiences and expectations to predict likely outcomes from a relatively small number of observed samples. So when a human thinks about a cat, she can probably picture the way it moves, hear the sound of purring, feel the impending scratch from an unsheathed claw. She has a rich store of sensory information at her disposal to understand the idea of a ‘cat’, and other related concepts that might help her interact with such a creature.

If the "humans think with their whole body" argument is correct, then is there any way for an AI to attain the human model of intelligence other than building an autonomous humanoid AI robot? One that is essentially a human replica, apart from the fact that it would be mechanical and digital instead of biological.