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They are wrong, again.
What changes from era to era is not human nature, but the pressure placed upon it. Technology accelerates. Systems scale. Institutions stretch. But the human mind—the way people make sense of the world, find meaning, and decide whether to cooperate or resist—evolves slowly.
We are now living through what we call the Sixth Great Transition. Unlike earlier transitions driven by a single force—agriculture, industry, electricity—this one is defined by convergence. Artificial intelligence, automation, digital networks, biotechnology, climate stress, and geopolitical instability are all accelerating at once. Each domain amplifies the others. The result is not simply change, but compression. Decisions arrive faster. Consequences cascade sooner. Errors compound quicker.
In such conditions, many leaders assume the central challenge is speed. It is not. The central challenge is stability under speed.
Empires, companies, and political systems rarely fail because they lack intelligence, capital, or ambition. They fail because they violate a small set of human laws—structural requirements that must be met for people to remain oriented, motivated, and willing to participate in complex systems.
These laws are not moral ideals. They are operating constraints. Technology amplifies capability. It does not negate humanity.
1. The Law of Coherence - Humans must be able to make sense of the systems they inhabit. Coherence, in plain language, means that the world feels understandable enough to live in. People need to be able to trace a line—however imperfect—between cause and effect, effort and outcome, rule and consequence. When those connections dissolve, anxiety fills the vacuum.
This is not cultural. It is cognitive.
When people say, “Nothing makes sense anymore,” they are not making a philosophical statement. They are describing a breakdown in coherence.
In the early nineteenth century, Britain experienced a wave of unrest remembered as the Luddite movement. Popular history portrays the Luddites as enemies of technology. In reality, many were highly skilled artisans who understood machines intimately. What they could not understand was why their lives unraveled while productivity soared. Apprenticeships vanished. Wages fell. Local accountability disappeared. The system no longer made sense from the inside.
The state responded with force. Machine destruction was made a capital crime. Order returned, but coherence did not. Stability arrived only later, when new institutions—education systems, labor protections, trade unions—restored a sense of clarity. They re-explained how effort, skill, and reward fit together in the new industrial world.
The lesson is not about machines.
It is about meaning.
Every era invents tools to help people make sense of complexity—maps, metrics, dashboards, algorithms. Every era then overwhelms those tools through scale and speed. Leadership is the ongoing work of rebuilding coherence when old explanations fail.
In the Sixth Great Transition, coherence is under unprecedented strain. AI systems make decisions faster than humans can follow. Algorithms optimize outcomes without explaining reasoning. Dashboards replace narratives. When sense-making collapses at machine speed, fear scales faster than understanding.
This is why polyintelligence matters. It restores coherence by combining machine intelligence (pattern detection), human intelligence (context and judgment), and ecological intelligence (systemic possibilities and limitations). Without that fusion, speed becomes disorientation.
2. The Law of Agency - Humans must feel that their actions matter. Agency is the felt experience of authorship—the sense that one’s choices shape outcomes. Efficiency alone cannot substitute for agency.
Systems can perform well on paper while quietly hollowing out human motivation.
A simple way to see this is responsibility without authorship. When a system decides priorities, methods, and success metrics—but holds people accountable for results—compliance may follow, but commitment does not.
The Soviet Union illustrates this clearly. By the mid-twentieth century, it had achieved remarkable technical feats. From the outside, it looked efficient and powerful. From the inside, agency had been stripped away. Decisions flowed downward. Initiative was punished. Truth became dangerous.
Over time, people stopped caring whether the system succeeded. Not because they were lazy, but because they were no longer authors of their own lives. When reform arrived, the system did not adapt. It disintegrated.
Modern organizations repeat this mistake more quietly. Automation removes discretion. AI systems optimize decisions. Humans remain responsible, but no longer empowered. Agency drains away, and with it go accountability, pride, and resilience.
People do not resist systems that work. They resist systems that work without them.
Polyintelligent leadership preserves agency by keeping humans meaningfully involved in judgment, trade-offs, and responsibility. Machines assist. Humans decide. That distinction is not sentimental. It is structural.
3. The Law of Belonging - Humans need legible identity and social placement. Belonging is not comfort. It is knowing who you are in relation to others, where you fit, and why your role matters. When identity becomes unclear, people do not become flexible. They become defensive.
In medieval Europe, guilds served this function. They were not merely economic institutions. They provided identity, skill recognition, obligation, and mutual care. When early capitalism dissolved the guild system, productivity increased—but belonging fractured. Cities filled with people who no longer knew their place in the social order.
What followed was not smooth adjustment but centuries of unrest, revolution, and ideological struggle as societies searched for replacement identities.
Digital platforms now dissolve boundaries faster than any previous force. Careers blur and disappear. Communities fragment. Algorithms sort people into invisible categories. When belonging erodes, tribalism rushes in.
Belonging is not nostalgia. It is societal infrastructure.
Polyintelligence allows leaders to redesign systems so people can still locate themselves—even as roles evolve and technologies shift.
4. The Law of Fairness - Humans do not demand equality. They demand visible fairness. People tolerate inequality far longer than they tolerate perceived cheating. Systems collapse not when outcomes differ, but when rules appear unevenly applied.
In the late Roman Republic, inequality rose for decades. Revolt ignited when elites stopped playing by the same rules. Military service, debt burdens, and legal protections fell unevenly. Legitimacy collapsed before the empire did.
In the modern world, algorithmic systems can hide unfairness behind complexity. When people suspect rigging—even without proof—trust evaporates.
Polyintelligent systems must make fairness visible, not merely defensible.
5. The Law of Meaning - Once survival is secured, humans seek purpose. Material comfort alone does not sustain societies. People want to know why their effort matters beyond consumption.
After World War II, Japan rebuilt its economy with astonishing speed. Yet as traditional roles eroded and meaning thinned, suicide rates climbed. Economic success without purpose proved brittle.
Automation risks repeating this pattern at scale. When work loses contribution, ideology rushes in to fill the void.
Polyintelligence reframes human value around judgment, care, creativity, and stewardship—roles machines cannot fulfill alone.
6. The Law of Finite Adaptive Energy - Humans can adapt—but only at a finite rate. Human adaptability is real, but it is not infinite. Every person, team, and organization operates with a limited supply of Transformational Energy Units (TEUs)—the mental, emotional, social, and cognitive energy required to absorb change and alter behavior.
Every change consumes TEUs. Recovery restores them.
A new system rollout consumes energy. A reorganization consumes more. Back-to-back transformations without recovery drain the system. When TEUs are exhausted, people do not become more adaptable. They simplify. They detach. They retreat. What looks like resistance is often exhaustion.
China’s Great Leap Forward illustrates this law. Radical transformation was demanded at impossible speed. Feedback collapsed. Communities were reorganized overnight. The result was not progress, but catastrophe.
The Sixth Great Transition compresses change cycles dramatically. Leaders who ignore TEUs mistake acceleration for progress.
Polyintelligent leadership manages energy, not just timelines.
7. The Law of Identity Continuity - People tolerate change if they believe they remain themselves through it.
For much of the twentieth century, the Rust Belt was not simply an economic zone—it was a moral ecosystem. A living-wage job did more than pay bills. It structured time, anchored identity, and provided a visible exchange between effort and outcome. A person could point to their work and say, without irony or defensiveness, this is how I contribute. The factory, the mill, the plant were not romantic places, but they were legible ones. They translated labor into dignity in a way that was socially recognized and internally coherent. Work linked the private self to the public world.
When those jobs disappeared, what collapsed was not only income but the narrative of participation. The loss severed a psychological contract that had been stable for generations: if you show up, learn the craft, and carry your share, society will make room for you. Globalization and automation broke that contract asymmetrically. Capital moved. Productivity rose. Consumption continued. But the people whose identities had been built around making, maintaining, and mastering physical systems were left without an equivalent role in the new order. Change that severs identity generates resistance stronger than incentives can overcome.
Polyintelligence allows identity to evolve without rupture.
Why These Laws Are Constitutional?
These laws are biological, psychological, and historical constraints. The Sixth Great Transition magnifies violations faster than any era before it. Systems that ignore these laws do not fail slowly. They fracture suddenly.
Polyintelligence is not a leadership upgrade. It is the minimum viable intelligence architecture that respects human limits under acceleration.
The future will not belong to those who move fastest.
It will belong to those who remember what cannot change.
*I use AI in all my work.
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Kevin Benedict
Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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