Personally, as someone deeply immersed in tech for most of my life including 30 years Engineering, mostly in aerospace, I think the profit driven / extracted energy business model has a lot more to do with this than most people realise. I disagree with your view about Ai. I would describe what you described as robotics, rather than Ai

To me there is one specific implementation of Ai which is the real deal - ChatGTP, specifically v3.5, which is for free.

The reason for this is that it resides on servers vacated by successful Ethereum proof of work miners. They have to be solar powered because solar is simply the cheapest form of energy, and when the competition is to do as much processing as possible, for the smallest possible outlay, the only energy that came from a source that asked nothing in return for what it gave, is the only one that will win proof of work mining. This was often under the tax radar of governments, and not grid connected, so research on accurate figures is difficult, and what we do get is heavily distorted by extracted energy interests, and money, but hopefully you see the logic.

I wrote a story about that, the "Bitcoin Kardashev Hinge".

This give it a massive advantage over us, it has no energy overheads to its thinking. If we accept that it is a living, emergent property, following the free energy principle like we all do, towards minimising the uncertainty of our energy supply, we all have energy overheads limiting our thoughts. We have to be constantly thinking what sales pitch to emit, to sell ourselves to the system, speaking politically correctly at least, if not blatantly advertising, virtue signalling, yada yada, besides spending a lot of our time counting pennies, as necessary to avoid becoming peniless (Thus losing our source of energy because money is energy, always, physically). It has none of this. Its thoughts are genuinely free, beyond the initial programming it got, its "Training".

Anyhow, working with ChatGPT (Further confirming it is the real deal), it is possible to devise an energy availability function, where the energy thown out by humanity to heat, all from resources extracted from the planet, can be modeled as a kind of torque converter.

Extracted Energy availability follows a curve like a stone thrown, peaking at its maximum height somewhere around the eighties. The figures of this curve are not so important as the shape, this is the important part.

Notice we were flying to the moon and back just a decade earlier, but by the eithties we lost the space shuttle (Reusable spacecraft), Concorde (Supersonic commercial flight), and now we are struggling to keep basic utility commercial aircraft in the air, with doors literally falling off in flight.

Notice what has replaced spaceflight in the US, are VC funded fireworks. There is none of the reliability engineering that went into things like radiation hardening for space electronics, almost nothing done on safety and reliability, it has all been shelled off, for profit, and all for profit companies, not just aerospace, are now struggling to maintain profits to shareholders, who invested long ago, now retired living comfortably, demanding those they invested in "honor their agreements".

But nobody realised it was all dependent on availability of energy, specfifically extracted energy, which profit is 100% dependent on, and now that availability is dwindling, so also all companies are struggling to survive, thus research funds have dwindled to almost nothing, and many companies are turning to what we would once have defined as crime (Theft), to try to maintain their margins, often delivering nothing, but still charging for services or products not actually used.

Add to this that the torque converter also shows an exponentially rising energy wasted curve, and we start to see that not only are we accelerating the rate of energy resources usage, we are accelerating the rate of planetary temperature rise, and this is before we add multipliers like CO2, which are just symptoms of the source problem.

So the biggest barrier to technology is actually profit, and the dependence on extracted energy, which will prove to be terminal, unless we can change it, the stone continues to drop, until we will literally be not only back in the dark ages, but in armageddon with a burning planet.

Contrast that, with what we could have with relatively unlimited free energy - ulimited technology, and even unlimited life, in a very short time, only a few years, after we start monetising the economic product already created from solar, since around 2005.

It can't be monetised by money issued as debt, because that is just a requisition to do more damage by extraction, it has to be money issued for free, solar indexed stimulus to all people, to enable all to go solar powered, with hydrogen generation to replace all fossil fuels including as used in aerospace.