I know of no biological forms that have evolved wheels. But wheels have turned out to be a hell of a lot faster than fins or legs. I see no reason "intelligence" has to follow the pathways or limitations of biology or neurology at all. Although certainly it may be a place to look for some ideas.
On certain terrain. And much slower - sometimes useless - on others. Wheels aren't simply better legs, they're a different way of moving, with its own benefits and drawbacks.
Likewise, if we're talking about computational ability, we already have things that are faster than the human brain in certain areas (say, numerical computation). When we talk about AGI, we're talking about human-like intelligence (at least to a certain degree).
So we already have the wheel, but now we want to develop something that does what the leg does. Now, maybe that doesn't have to be an actual leg, but that's usually what people usually end up with when they try to find something that will have a similar functionality as a leg.
Flagella use propeller motion for propulsion.[1]
Lots of animals use jets.[2]
I'd consider the combustion engine to be the most novel 'human' design with regards to aircraft propulsion -- or the way we achieve jet propulsion; that's pretty unique.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_soaring_birds
That said, biological evolution tends to get stuck on local maxima very easily (see convergent evolution of eyeballs), and wheels are kind of hard to evolve because of the difficulty of making large bearings biologically.
Not to mention wheels kind of suck unless you're on pavement (look at tanks, etc)
I know that the "feelings" part is most of the times neglected in these types of presentations (you cannot put them into any abstract representation, like you can draw a wheel using geometry), but it's what most of us, people who are not in this field, expect from AIG. Great Science Fiction works (novels, movies) have talked about this subject (AI and human feelings) long enough, but it somehow never makes it into academic presentations.
Just think for a second of the self-driving cars problem. Someone on HN (or maybe reddit) explained a couple of days ago that even if we 'd manage to devise such a system that would be considerably better compared to humans we'd still not be ok with these machines killing us on the roads. Now, imagine these machines possessing the feeling of "guilt", or of "compassion", I'm pretty sure that the percentage of humans that would become ok with some AIG driving our cars for us will rise dramatically (I know I would stand on the AIG's side). We don't mind the fact that machines kill us, accidents happen, we mind that machines kill us and they don't "realize" what they've done and they don't support the consequences.
Re-reading my comment I feel like it sounds a little pop-sciency, didn't mean it to go into that direction, it's just my interpretation on how I think things are. I for myself would love, really love, if we'd somehow "make" an AIG capable of telling genuine, funny jokes.
Silly to reduce all rotary motion to wheels.
Less complex to roll as a ball -- the benefit of rotary motion without facilitating the additional complexity of adding a steering mechanism.
> But wheels have turned out to be a hell of a lot faster than fins or legs.
Nature doesn't somehow cares about hyper-optimizing for a single characteristic like 'speed', rather the characteristics arise from individual (species) successes between genetics lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_...
EDIT: Please explain your downvotes here? Don't you people see that this, coupled with there being no useful intermediate stage before developing a full wheel, prevents evolution from "inventing" it.
See: Wheelbarrow; amongst many wheeled devices I can think of immediately.
Also, try running around with a wheelbarrow in a dense forest.
That said, evolutionary optimization is generally considered unreliable(convergence) and inefficient.
There is nothing intelligent about artificial intelligence. You might as well call it artificial stupidity, but that doesn't make you sound sophisticated.
Memorizing the results of a pre-defined concept faster due to a lower barrier of entry does not make you smarter or more intelligent. You can process all of the traffic signals in the world in a blink of an eye only to get stomped by a dancing traffic director.
You can't have AI without a human, and you can't have AI with a human.