“You can’t manage your way through a great transition with a spreadsheet.”
Yet that’s exactly what many leaders are trying to do—optimize their way through systemic collapse using 20th-century tools and yesterday’s assumptions. What we’re facing isn’t just disruption. It’s a full-blown operating system upgrade for civilization. And it requires a whole new kind of leadership.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, disoriented, and vaguely betrayed by the promises of progress, congratulations—you’re alive during a Great Transition. Not a blip. Not a market correction. A full-system transformation of how humans live, work, relate, think, and survive.
The last few times this happened, it gave us steam engines, global supply chains, electric lights, indoor plumbing, and middle-class dreams. This time, the outcome is still undecided.
For thousands of years, humanity has lived in the shadow of a wall. It was the wall of complexity—the place where our imagination outpaced our ability to calculate, predict, or control. We could see just high enough to glimpse possibilities, but not high enough to map them. Sailors hugged the shoreline because oceans were too complex to navigate. Doctors bled patients because the body’s mysteries remained opaque. Economies rose and collapsed because no one could model the system they were part of.
Even games reminded us of our limits. For millennia, the board game Go was considered unassailable by machines. Its possibilities may even outnumber the atoms in the universe. Human players mastered it not through brute force, but by intuition, creativity, and pattern recognition. Complexity was our fortress.
Then, in 2016, a machine climbed the wall. Google’s AlphaGo didn’t just defeat the best human Go player—it overwhelmed him by seeing thousands of futures in advance. Not by being cleverer, but by being able to contemplate what we could not. The wall of complexity cracked.
That moment wasn’t about a board game. It was a signal. For the first time in history, machines could scale complexity faster than we could. And once the wall breaks, everything changes.
Today, AI doesn’t stop at the gates of ignorance—it crashes through them. It reads proteins and designs new drugs. It simulates economies and forecasts pandemics. It optimizes supply chains across oceans in seconds. Where humans used to stop and speculate, machines now accelerate and decide.
But here is the paradox: when the wall of complexity falls, abundance floods in. The problem is no longer scarcity of intelligence—it is overproduction of it. Too many insights, too many optimizations, too many scenarios for humans to metabolize. Backlogs of brilliance pile up like cargo ships outside a jammed harbor. Complexity has not disappeared—it has shifted from calculation to digestion.
This is why we stand at the threshold of the Sixth Great Transition. The earlier ones were driven by breakthroughs in food, faith, science, industry, and information. This one is different. For the first time in history, the wall is falling across every domain at once. Science, technology, society, economics, geopolitics, the environment, and philosophy are colliding in a single systemic shift.
The question is not whether this transition is happening. It is whether we can metabolize it.
What Makes the Sixth Transition Different
The Sixth Great Transition is not defined by one invention, one war, or one ideology. It is defined by convergence—a compound transformation unfolding across every major system of civilization.
Technology is not just speeding up—it’s transforming what it means to know, to decide, and to create.
Artificial intelligence now generates text, images, software, music, and models of the future. It does so in real time, at scale, with outputs indistinguishable from human creativity. Meanwhile, quantum computing is approaching thresholds that will make classical computing feel like a cassette tape in a neural lace world. Synthetic biology is already reshaping agriculture, medicine, and materials. Automation is not coming—it’s scaling.
Society, under the influence of both economic shock and algorithmic culture, is fragmenting into micro-tribes of identity, belief, and outrage. Generational expectations are diverging. Trust in institutions is decaying. The glue of shared experience is melting in the heat of relentless acceleration.
The economy is no longer organized around physical factories or even knowledge work. It’s tilting toward platform-mediated, AI-augmented, post-labor participation. Decentralized finance is challenging traditional banks. NFTs and digital assets are morphing ideas of value and ownership. The marketplace has become a game engine.
Nature, our oldest ally and final constraint, is now a destabilizing force. Glaciers are retreating. Rivers are drying. Oceans are acidifying. We are not facing environmental issues. We are living through ecological destabilization—conditions that make planning, migration, agriculture, and civilization increasingly precarious.
Geopolitics is no longer a game of nations alone. Influence is now wielded by social networks, tech platforms, AI systems, and non-state actors with unprecedented reach. War has become asymmetric, cyber, networked and personal. Power is fragmenting and concentrating—simultaneously.
Philosophy is no longer abstract. It’s encoded into algorithms. Ethics are embedded in machine decisions. AI is forcing us to ask old questions with new stakes: What is consciousness? What is personhood? What is real?
And science itself has entered a recursive loop. It no longer just observes the world—it simulates it. Edits it. Remixes it. Knowledge is no longer cumulative; it’s generative.
This is not a future we can manage using industrial blueprints. This is a shift in reality itself.
The Optimism Engine
As challenging as this great transition sounds there is a reason optimism belongs in this discussion. Progress itself depends on it. Every great era of transformation began not simply with new tools, but with a mindset that believed in a better tomorrow.
The Renaissance was not inevitable. Europe could have remained cloistered in scholastic rigidity. Instead, optimism about rediscovered classical texts, new maps of the world, and the possibility of human genius unleashed centuries of art and science. The Enlightenment wasn’t just reason—it was the radical optimism that knowledge could actually improve society.
The Industrial Revolution was optimism-made-steel. Cities swelled with squalor and disease, yet people leaned into invention with the belief that progress could outweigh the suffering and disruption. Railroads, telegraphs, steamships, and vaccines were born not from certainty but from confidence that the future was improvable.
Even in living memory, optimism has been the accelerant of transformation. When John F. Kennedy told a skeptical nation, “We choose to go to the moon,” he was betting not just on technology, but on mindset. The Apollo program was a triumph of applied optimism—proof that when societies lean forward into the unknown, they sometimes land on other worlds.
Without optimism, complexity looks like a wall. With optimism, it looks like a frontier.
Why Polyintelligence?
If the Sixth Transition is defined by collapsing walls of complexity, then survival depends on building the capacity to navigate them. This is where polyintelligence comes in—not a buzzword, but a framework for metabolizing the convergence of this era.
Polyintelligence rests on three interdependent layers of intelligence. Alone, each layer is incomplete. Together, they provide a navigational compass for the age of convergence:
- Cognitive Intelligence (Human Judgment) – Our uniquely human ability to reason, imagine, empathize, and morally discern. It is where stories, ethics, and long-loop thinking reside. Without it, we move fast but lose our way.
- Computational Intelligence (Machine Speed) – Algorithms and AI systems that can calculate, optimize, and simulate at scales beyond human capacity. It is the intelligence that cracks the wall of Go, models pandemics, and manages trillion-dollar markets in milliseconds.
- Ecological Intelligence (Natural Systems) – The living systems we depend on—climates, watersheds, biodiversity—carry their own logic. Ignoring them leads to collapse. Listening to them makes resilience possible.
These three layers form a polyintelligent fabric—a way of weaving human judgment, machine speed, ecological awareness, moral clarity, and collective alignment into a coherent whole.
A Polyintelligent Future
If history is any guide, the future will not be won by those with the most data, the biggest servers, or the flashiest AI models. It will be won by those who can metabolize complexity into clarity—who can synchronize polyintelligence into a tempo that societies can actually follow.
The wall of complexity is not gone. It is shifting. We are builders of engines, navigators of seas, climbers of walls.
The Sixth Transition calls us to be more than industrial-age experts. It calls us to be polyintelligent leaders—to align optimism with digital systems, ethics with speed, and resilience with interdependence.
This isn’t just another leadership fad; it’s how to survive the Sixth Great Transition.
Recognizing a historic transition is only the beginning. Surviving and thriving in it requires new capabilities. The next article in this series explains why polyintelligence—fusing human, machine, and ecological intelligence—has become essential.
Listen to our AI generated podcast hosts discuss this article in detail.
*I use AI in all my work.
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Kevin Benedict
Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist 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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