>Folks like Andy Clark then put much more emphasis on having bodies

The word body is very biased in the human mind. What is a body exactly? What is the extension of a body and where does the system boundary of the body and extensions stop at? Where do the human biases of having a 'self body' keep us from realizing that things things like 'systems bodies' or 'society bodies' exist and incorporate their own forms of intelligence?

The idea of hive minds is generally presented to us as alien in movies and literature, but to me seems like the most likely form of AI. Sensor networks, be they are implemented in robots like we see in media, flying drones, 'smart' surfaces, devices we carry around, even in ways we've not imagined where data is shared between small processing units close to the data for quick reaction and then further processed by powerful AI computers elsewhere seem like a much more likely architecture than what we are used to in humans.

A body is any outpost for our consciousness, it's something we can use to interact with the world. If the body has its own designated memory, we'll perceive that construct as our personality.

Brain implants feeding off our sensory and cognitive circuitry seems the century long challenge. Robots and bots are interesting distortion mirrors along the way.