The key constraint of the Sixth Great Transition is human viability—the ability of people to remain coherent, responsible, and meaningfully engaged inside systems that operate faster than humans.
As we all recognize, humans cannot compete against the power and speed of digital platforms, AI, and automation. So what roles and responsibilities do leaders have when speed forces humans to the sidelines?
To answer that question, we must first ask another: What do human leaders owe society—and what does society owe humans.
This question is particularly important when considering how to support your society through times of massive and unrelenting change. It is the implicit social contract of leadership.
For most of history, change was slower. Power was constrained by time, distance, and human limits. Today, however, acceleration, automation, and autonomous systems have altered leadership. Leaders must now oversee systems that act at machine speed, and scale globally with irreversible consequences. When systems accelerate like this, responsibility concentrates.
Leaders are now the custodians of the environments in which other humans must work, decide, adapt, absorb risk, and endure consequences. People live inside them. Authority over conditions therefore carries huge leadership obligations.
The Leadership Contract
Societies grant leaders permissions: authority, resources, asymmetry, and discretion under uncertainty. In return, society expects one thing: That leaders preserve the conditions under which humans can continue to function meaningfully and responsibly over time. When that obligation is violated, consent erodes through exhaustion, disengagement, and legitimacy decay.
Leadership Obligations
In the face of inhuman digital and machine speeds, machine intelligence and processing power, human leaders must understand their responsibilities, obligations and rules:
- Preserve human viability.
- Performance that consumes people is not success.
- Respect human constraints.
- Systems must not require inhuman endurance.
- Preserve meaning and legibility.
- People must understand why outcomes occur and where responsibility lives.
- Own systemic outcomes.
- Authority without accountability voids legitimacy.
- Treat systemic harm as systemic.
- Moralizing structural damage destroys trust.
*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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