More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Archimedes explained one of the simplest and most powerful ideas in mechanics: the lever.
The principle was straightforward. Give someone a long enough lever and a properly positioned fulcrum, and a relatively small force can move an enormous weight. Archimedes is famously associated with the statement, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.”
The important insight was not that humans had suddenly become stronger. They hadn’t.
The architecture around the human had changed.
The lever multiplied what a person could accomplish.
Human history can be understood, in part, as the continuing search for better levers.
Agriculture gave us leverage over food production. Machines gave us leverage over physical labor. Steam engines and electricity gave us leverage over energy. Industrial organizations gave us leverage through coordination and scale. Computers gave us leverage over calculation. Networks gave us leverage over communication and connectivity.
Now artificial intelligence is giving us leverage over something different: intelligence itself.
This is one of the defining characteristics of what I call the Sixth Great Transition.
For most of human history, intelligence was scarce, expensive, local and overwhelmingly human. If an organization wanted more analysis, writing, planning, design, problem-solving or decision support, it generally needed more people with the necessary knowledge and experience.
That assumption is changing.
Machine intelligence can increasingly analyze information, generate ideas, write software, create content, recognize patterns, coordinate activities and operate systems. One human working with intelligent machines may soon be able to accomplish things that once required dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people.
We are building an extraordinarily long lever.
But Archimedes’ lesson contains something else that deserves our attention.
A lever requires a fulcrum.
Where you place that fulcrum determines what happens when force is applied. The same is true of technology. Artificial intelligence does not determine its own purpose. People, organizations and institutions decide where it is deployed, what it is optimized to accomplish, what authority it receives and what boundaries surround it.
That makes leadership increasingly important, not less.
When intelligence becomes abundant, the central leadership question shifts from simply, “What can we do?” to “What should we do?”
Capability is not purpose.
Intelligence is not wisdom.
And intelligence does not confer moral authority.
The more powerful our technological leverage becomes, the more important human judgment, ethics, responsibility and stewardship become.
This is why one question runs through
my book, The Future of Human Leadership: When Intelligence Is Everywhere:
“Whom do I serve?”
It is a deceptively simple question. But it forces us to think about the purpose toward which all this extraordinary capability is being directed.
Are we using our new leverage simply to make organizations faster? To reduce costs? To automate more work? To increase profits? Those may all be legitimate objectives. But they are incomplete answers.
The larger question is whether the systems we create ultimately help people, organizations, societies and ecosystems flourish together.
Archimedes taught us how a small force could move an enormous object.
The Sixth Great Transition gives us increasingly powerful technological levers of our own.
The challenge for this generation of leaders is deciding where to place the fulcrum, who controls the lever, what we intend to move—and, ultimately, whom all that power is meant to serve.
*I use AI in all my work.
***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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