The power of imagination only gets you so far. There are diminishing returns to technology and innovation in most areas. Moore's law is a notable exception, but if you extend it to
what Moore's law buys you -- what you can do with all that additional computing firepower that you couldn't do before, it's pretty minimal.
As an example: any heat engine is limited in its efficiency by Carnot's Law. You can apply all the electronic smarts to it you want, but the best you'll get in efficiency improvements is a closer approximation of the theoretical maximum.
You can phase-shift and use different technologies -- hybrid vehicle drives allow for greater engine efficiencies (constant power) and energy recover (regenerative braking), but that's fairly minimal -- the complexity of a Prius and a comparably efficient high-efficiency diesel is great.
There are other issues in expanding systems beyond certain scales -- even if you've got genius minds out there untapped, how do you 1) train and educate them, 2) find them, and 3) incorporate and utilize their advances -- in all the other noise.
I don't see a huge win here.