The Imagination Gap: Why Most People Can’t See What GenAI is Becoming

Human brains are not wired for disruption.

They’re wired for survival.

Which means they’re wired for patterns — what worked before, what kept us safe, what’s familiar.

So when transformative technologies like Generative AI and AGI appear — not as a feature upgrade but as a fundamental shift — most people default to what they know. They retrofit. They tweak. They incrementally adapt.

They use a rocket engine to power a bicycle.

This isn’t a knock on intelligence. It’s an insight into cognition. Our mental models are built from lived experiences. But GenAI isn’t born of the past — it’s born of possibility. It doesn’t evolve linearly; it accelerates exponentially, probabilistically, and creatively.

And therein lies the problem.

The people making critical decisions — leaders, boards, policy architects — often don’t have the mental scaffolding to see what’s actually happening. They interpret revolutionary tools as evolutionary steps. They ask GenAI to write a better email instead of reimagining how work itself is structured. They ask it to reduce cost, not redefine value.

The result?

We risk building tomorrow on the logic of yesterday.

What’s needed now isn’t just technical expertise. It’s cognitive diversity.

We need the unreasonable ones. The edge-thinkers.

The people who haven’t spent their lives optimizing systems — but imagining new ones.

The ones who don’t just ask “how can we do this better?”

But “what should we no longer be doing at all?”

These are the advisors, strategists, product leaders, and creatives who can hold complexity, abstraction, and ambiguity — and turn it into radical clarity. They don’t just adopt the tools. They redesign the game.

The implications of not having them are enormous.

• You’ll move fast — but in the wrong direction.
• You’ll optimize for relevance — and miss significance.
• You’ll scale what should be retired — and fail to birth what the world actually needs next.

This isn’t a call to fire everyone and hire only futurists.

It’s a call to surround yourself with cognitive contrast.

With thinkers who challenge your assumptions, not echo them.

With builders who ask better questions, not just faster answers.

Because the real bottleneck in the GenAI era isn’t the technology.

It’s the imagination to use it wisely.

And that imagination? It doesn’t live in spreadsheets or roadmaps.

It lives in the minds of people brave enough to build what’s never existed before.