History follows you everywhere — it trails behind like an unshakable shadow, reminding you of debts, traditions, and unfinished business. The future, though, doesn’t wait outside. It kicks in your door, uninvited and unpredictable, carrying a mixed bag of opportunities and crises. Leaders don’t get to choose whether it shows up. The only choice is how prepared they are when it does. And if you want to see how intelligence survives such intrusions, don’t start in a boardroom. Start in an anthill, where survival depends not on hierarchy but on coherence, connection, and the ability to adapt together.
Ants don’t follow blueprints. No single ant knows how to build a ventilation shaft or coordinate a food convoy. But collectively, they do. One ant finds sugar, lays a trail, and thousands follow. They aren’t smart because they think; they’re smart because they’re connected. This is ecological intelligence in action: simple parts forming a coherent whole through optimized information flow. Every signal matters. Timing is everything.
Now jump to New York City in the 1990s. Crime was spiking. The subway system looked like a rolling mural of despair. The social fabric frayed. But instead of collapsing, the city pivoted. Not with brute force, but with a strategy. Police adopted CompStat, a software solution that enabled near real-time crime mapping across the city.
It wasn’t just a computer dashboard—it was the early fusion of machine intelligence with street-level policing. For the first time, thousands of paper reports—arrest logs, 911 calls, incident records—were digitized and dumped into relational databases. Once scattered in filing cabinets, these records now lived on networked PCs that precincts could access in near real time.
Then came the maps. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layered crime data onto city grids, exposing hot spots in both space and time. Patterns that once took months of anecdotal reporting to spot now appeared instantly: a rash of robberies around one subway stop, a surge of assaults in a particular housing project, or the telltale creep of drug trade into a new neighborhood.
Data visualization tools—heat maps, charts, graphs—turned numbers into signals that even the most skeptical commanders couldn’t ignore. Weekly CompStat meetings became tense rituals of accountability. Commanders were no longer armed with stories and excuses; they were confronted with trends and correlations, with lines on graphs that told the truth about whether their precinct was slipping or improving.
It was as if the city had suddenly sprouted a network of sensors, each 911 call and arrest acting as a node in a human-machine nervous system. Machine intelligence—primitive compared to today’s AI—was already at work, transforming noise into patterns and patterns into decisions. Patrols could be shifted before crime waves peaked. Resources could be targeted where they mattered most.
CompStat didn’t eliminate crime, but it changed the tempo. It accelerated feedback loops. It forced leaders to operate on data rather than delay. And in the process, it rewrote the city’s story—from despair to adaptation. That was human intelligence, machine intelligence, and ecological awareness of a city’s rhythms, working together to bend the future in a better direction.
Then came Ebola in 2014. A virus that turned funerals into transmission chains and villages into quarantine zones. Containing it wasn’t just about medicine—it was about trust. About local leaders persuading communities to alter sacred rituals. About epidemiologists mapping infections with laptops in tents. About global institutions accelerating vaccine development while misinformation surged. The response was messy, uneven, and late—but ultimately, it worked. Because multiple intelligences aligned: human courage, machine modeling, ecological understanding, and moral clarity.
These aren’t random anecdotes. They’re early chapters in a new kind of operating manual. A signal that the future doesn’t reward the biggest or the fastest, but the most polyintelligent: those who can think across domains, move at the right tempo, and act before the window for adaptation closes.
Each story shares a common infrastructure. Behind the action was a flow of information: captured, moved, analyzed, and acted upon. We call this kind of system an Optimized Information Logistics System (OILS). Ant pheromones are OILS in miniature. CompStat was a proto-OILS for urban governance. The Ebola response was a fractured but ultimately functional global OILS under pressure. Fail the flow, and the system collapses. Optimize it, and the system learns, adapts, and survives.
This series is about how to do that.
The Sixth Great Transition
Across history, there have been moments when the game board gets flipped:
• From foraging to farming
• From myths and rituals to ethics and religions in the Axial Age
• From theology to science in the Renaissance
• From land to factories in the Industrial Age
• From analog to digital in the Information Age
Each of these transitions reorganized not just economies, but identities, values, and what it meant to be human. Each was driven by converging forces—tools, ideas, and environments colliding in ways that forced reinvention.
Take the Black Death. In the mid-14th century, plague emptied half the towns of Europe. It was horrific. But when the labor force collapsed, feudal structures cracked. Serfs negotiated better wages. Land ownership shifted. Old hierarchies lost their grip. Out of that upheaval came new wealth, literacy, and eventually the Renaissance. In short: catastrophe created room for creativity.
Or consider the telegraph. By the mid-19th century, wires strung across continents compressed the time it took to move information from weeks to minutes. Traders could arbitrage across oceans. Generals could command troops in near real time. Journalists could report from the front lines overnight. The telegraph turned the Industrial Revolution from a regional phenomenon into a global acceleration—because it accelerated decision-making itself.
What makes today’s moment—the Sixth Great Transition—different is that all domains are colliding at once, and the tempo is exponential.
Science is rewriting life. AI is challenging cognition. The planet is pushing back. Governance is fragmenting. Philosophy is digitizing. And no single discipline, system, or leader can keep up.
Two things define it: scope and tempo. The scope is full-spectrum, spanning technology, economy, society, geopolitics, ecology, and meaning itself. The tempo is relentless—digital time has collapsed the interval between invention and disruption. Where earlier transitions gave humanity centuries or generations to adapt, the Sixth Great Transition gives us years—or sometimes hours.
Why now? Because technologies don’t evolve in isolation anymore; they evolve in combinatorial cascades. AI trains on biotechnology data, which is shaped by quantum modeling, which is deployed through robotics, which is powered by renewable energy grids, which are stressed by climate change. Each layer accelerates the others. Add to this the turbulence of geopolitics, the fragility of ecosystems, and the viral nature of misinformation, and you have a civilization being rewired in real time.
This is not a passing buzzword. It is a once-in-history reconfiguration of civilization’s operating system. And unlike past transitions, there is no off-ramp—no going back to a simpler, slower, more predictable past.
Polyintelligence: The Survival Requirement
If the Industrial Age belonged to the specialist, this age belongs to the polyintelligent: those who can weave together different modes of knowing and acting.
• Human intelligence brings insight, ethics, imagination, and the capacity to care.
• Machine intelligence brings speed, scale, automation, pattern recognition, and generative possibility.
• Ecological intelligence brings awareness of limits, long-loop consequences, and interdependence.
No single intelligence is sufficient anymore. Together, they form a new kind of strategic coherence—one that can metabolize complexity rather than be overwhelmed by it.
*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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