"...a single thread of experience through time."
Do human brains in general always work like this at the consciousness level? Dream states of consciousness exist, but they also seem single-threaded even if the state jumps around in ways more like context switching in an operating system than the steady awareness of the waking conscious mind. Then there are special cases - schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders - in which multiple threads of existence apparently do exist in one physical brain, with all the problems this situation creates for the person in question.
Now, could one create a system of multiple independent single-threaded conscious AI minds, each trained in a specific scientific or mathematical discipline, but communicating constantly with each other and passing ideas back and forth, to mimic the kind of scientific discovery that interdisciplinary academic and research institutions are known for? Seems plausible, but possibly a bit frightening - who knows what they'd come up with? Singularity incoming?
You're touching on why I don't think AI in the future will look at human intelligence. Or a better way to put it is "human intelligence looks like human intelligence because of limitations of the human body".
For example we currently spend a lot of time making AI output human writing, output human sounds, see the world as we hear it, see the world as we see it, hell even look like us. And this is great when working with and around humans. Maybe it will help it align with us, or maybe the opposite.
But if you imagined a large factory that requested input on one side and dumped out products on the other with no humans inside why would it need human hearing and speech at all? You'd expect everything to communicate on some kind of wireless protocol with a possible LIFI backup. None of the loud yelling people have to do. Most of the things working would have their intelligence minimized to lower power and cooling requirements. Depending on the machine vision requirements it could be very dark inside again reducing power usage. There would likely be a layer of management AI and guardian AI to make sure things weren't going astray and keep running smoothly. And all the data from that would run back to a cooled and well powered data center with what effectively is a hive mind from all the different sensors it's tracking.
Interesting idea. Notably bats are very good at echo-location so I wonder if your factory hive mind might decide this audio system is optimal for managing the factory floor.
However, what if these AI minds were 'just an average mind' as Turing hypothesized (some snarky comment about IBM IIRC). A bunch of average human minds implemented in silico isn't genius-level AGI but still kind of plausible.