Is your hypothesis that the lack of human imagination is preventing individuals from taking advantage of AI? Or that 'humanity as a whole' is not using it?

Just shooting some thoughts based on it, as its kind of fun:

Several things are needed for AI to be used by everyone, including not having a Butlerian Jihad. Because it is a threat to many's present ways of working, many do avoid it intentionally or have an aversion to it.

Reasonable or not, such fears certainly prevent people from taking advantage of it.

But at a level of 'humanity', the issue is mainly due to reality being physical. It takes movement of time, energy, and matter for things to change at those levels because of the fundamental physics that powers reality.

That and Government.

The bureaucracy governments have is like matter itself: heavy, difficult to move, and sometimes a burden, slowing things down as well. It can prevent overshooting as a dampening force, but it can certainly hinder progress (looking at you, EU).

Because Markets can represent the flow of time, energy, and matter, the structures and constraints they have put in place may themselves directly redirect assets to goods that don't produce functional value (leverage). This would be like the vast majority of NFTs and crypto-casinos, and perhaps physics-doomed technologies like Star Cloud. I digress...

AI, even SI existing for different companies, may be optimal for them, but the market may easily not be. It won't allocate resources more effectively.

Streamlined coordination between multiple companies enabled by SI, maybe. (Anthropic anyone?).

But in total, I would say the bottleneck is not Human Imagination. It is:

* Matter, Physics, Energy. * Governments * Markets