When Speed Breaks Humans

A reading.

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

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.

Human Capacity Preservation Will Decide Our Future, #25

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We talk constantly about technology, artificial intelligence, automation, and speed. We argue about tools, ethics, productivity, and disruption. But beneath all of those debates sits a far more consequential issue:

Can humans remain viable inside the systems we are building?

This question will shape the next several decades of business, governance, and society. It determines whether progress continues, stalls, or collapses.

The risk we face is not that machines will become too intelligent. It is that human capacity—judgment, ethics, trust, meaning, and adaptive energy—will be exhausted by systems that no longer fit people.

Understanding this requires clarity about three things:

1. What healthy humans are capable of producing?
2. What humans require in order to remain viable?
3. How modern systems unintentionally degrade those capacities—and how that degradation can be reversed?

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Leadership and Human Viability, #23

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. 

The Future of Automobile Manufacturing with Siemens Expert Kristian Kozole

In this episode of FOBtv — We take a deep dive into how automobile manufacturing is being fundamentally rewritten.  Our guest is Kristian Kozole, Vice President of Automotive at Siemens Digital Industries Software.  Kristian will help us understand what has actually changed over the past decade—and what the next ten years will demand of automobile manufacturers. From software-defined vehicles and AI-driven design to the real state of smart factories, digital twins, robotics, and resilient supply chains, this conversation explains how complex systems now work together on the factory floor. 

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***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.

How Clarity is Maintained in Foresight, #22

Earlier in this series, we examined how foresight erodes and fails—first through moral misalignment, then through cognitive distortion. We saw how:

1. Fear
2. Ego
3. Comfort
4. Denial
5. Status

Quietly drain away Transformational Energy Units (TEUs), and how those inner conditions harden into faulty mental models: 

• linear thinking
• nostalgia bias
• confirmation loops
• fragmented systems logic

These developments corrupt our ability to see clearly into the future.

Just as ecosystems regenerate after disturbance, human systems possess counterforces—disciplines that can help restore clarity, widen perception, and stabilize judgment under uncertainty. These counterforces are functional virtues that improve our ability to see into the future clearly. 

What follows are the nine virtues of foresight—the precise antidotes to the distortions described above. Each expands perception where a vice narrows it. Each replenishes TEUs where misalignment drains them. Together, they form the internal architecture required for polyintelligent leadership.

The Future of Shared Services with Expert Ajay Wadhwa

In this episode of FOBtv, I get the opportunity to sit down, viritually, with Tata Motors Global Services Limited CEO Ajay Wadhwa for a rare, inside look at the invisible engine powering the future of automobile manufacturing. As the industry accelerates toward electrification, AI, autonomy, and sustainability, this conversation reveals why shared services—often overlooked—are becoming a strategic force multiplier. 

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***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.

Human Viability Under Acceleration, #19

Modern societies rarely collapse because they lack intelligence, technology, or innovation. They collapse because the rate of change exceeds the capacity of humans to remain functional inside the systems they create. This condition—human viability under acceleration—is now the defining constraint of progress.

Acceleration is not merely speed. It is the compounding of speed across domains: science, technology, societal, geopolitical, economic, philosophical and environmental. Decisions that once unfolded over years now compress into minutes. Feedback loops tighten. Errors propagate instantly. Explanation trails action. What once felt like change now feels like perpetual motion.

Human beings did not evolve for this environment.

Human cognition is designed for pattern recognition over time, not continuous disruption. Judgment requires pause. Meaning requires narrative integration. Trust requires stability. Identity requires continuity. Acceleration strips away the time and space in which these capacities operate. The result is not adaptation, but degradation.

This is what “human viability under acceleration” actually means: whether people can continue to think, decide, belong, and care responsibly inside systems that never slow down.

The 7 Laws of Humanity the Future Cannot Break, #17

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Every generation believes its moment is different. New technologies and tools arrive. Old rules appear obsolete. Leaders look at the speed of change around them and quietly conclude that history is no longer relevant.

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.

Speed Beyond Humans, #16

In April 1860, the Pony Express thundered out of St. Joseph, Missouri, with eighty riders, 400 horses, and 190 relay stations stretching nearly 2,000 miles to Sacramento. Stations were placed every 10–15 miles—the distance a horse could run before exhaustion. Riders, mostly wiry teenagers, leapt from one steaming horse onto a fresh mount in less than two minutes and carried on at full gallop. A mochila—leather saddle cover with locked mail pouches—was thrown across the saddle, carrying the nation’s most urgent communications.

The Pony Express cut mail delivery from weeks to ten days. It carried Lincoln’s inaugural address west and California’s gold rush news east. 

It was a marvel of daring and planning: synchronized stations, recovery schedules for horses and riders, and a rhythm of endurance and precision.

And then, in October 1861, the telegraph lines met in Salt Lake City.

Messages now moved at the speed of electricity. In an instant, the Pony Express was obsolete. Not in a generation. Not in a decade. In just eighteen months.

That is the first leadership lesson of speed: no matter how brave your riders or how fine your horses, once the tempo of technology outruns human capability, courage is irrelevant. Only redesign matters.

Helping Today's Youth Use Foresight with Expert Aino Piispanen

To gain a deeper understanding of the future, begin with the people who will inherit it. In this episode of FOBtv, futurist Kevin Benedict sits down with Aino Piispanen—one of Finland’s leading voices on youth futures at the Hopeful Future project—to confront a stunning reality: young people’s belief in tomorrow is now at the lowest level ever recorded. Together, they explore why hope is diminishing, how loneliness and uncertainty distort imagination, and what it really takes to rebuild a sense of agency for the next generation. From the emotional breakthroughs Aino witnesses in futures workshops to the deeper question of whether today’s crisis is one of reality or imagination. If you care about the world we’re leaving to our children—and the one they’re preparing to shape—this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on X @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***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.

Vices and Virtues that Impact Foresight, #14

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How many of us have tried to convince another about the merits of an argument using data, facts, science, evidence and logic, only to make no progress at all.  The biases and lenses we all use to filter information changes our reality and view of the future as the following examples demonstrate.

On a frozen January afternoon in 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 sat on the runway at Washington National Airport. Snow drifted across the tarmac, visibility was low, and ice clung to the wings and engine inlets. Inside the cockpit, Captain Larry Wheaton studied the power readings with a growing sense of unease. “That doesn’t look right, does it?” he said softly—less a warning than a quiet appeal.

His first officer sensed the danger too. The instruments looked wrong. The engines felt slow. Nearby aircraft reported dangerous levels of ice. Yet both men excused their concerns, hoping the other would carry the burden of truth. Their unease grew, but neither spoke with the clarity reality demanded. Weak signals accumulated around them like snow flakes.

Moments later, Flight 90 lifted off with too little thrust. The engines stalled almost instantly, strangled by ice. The aircraft plunged into the Potomac River, killing seventy-eight people.

There was no mechanical failure.

The system did not break.

The humans did.

This cockpit was not simply a tragedy—it was a perfect illustration of moral misalignment: the quiet internal distortions that disable clear perception, distort orientation, and prevent leaders from acting on reality as it actually is. The pilots were not incompetent or malicious. They were human beings under emotional pressure, swept along by subtle vices—fear, deference, denial, avoidance, ego sensitivity. Each distortion was small. Together they made catastrophe inevitable.

Most systems do not crash into icy rivers; they drift, little by little, until the drift becomes distance. And always, misalignment destroys foresight long before it destroys anything else. Every inflection point begins with weak signals. Every future arrives with early warnings. But leaders, teams and organizations who are internally misaligned cannot adequately perceive them.

You cannot anticipate what you refuse to perceive. Let me repeat this point, “You cannot anticipate what you refuse to perceive.” Weak signals register only in systems that are aligned enough—internally clear enough—to let discomfort become information that is acted upon. 

Flight 90 was surrounded by signals: ice on the wings, abnormal power readings, sluggish acceleration, warnings from other pilots. But misalignment muffled those cues until they were no longer signals—only noise.

When leaders and organizations lose alignment, they lose their future.

Practicing & Navigating the Future, #13

Imagine being assigned to repair a complex machine without proper instructions. You know it should function, but you’re not sure whether the leftover screws, washers and roll of red wire are optional or the reason it doesn’t turn on. That’s what leading without foresight feels like.

Frank Diana, principal futurist at Tata Consultancy Services, argues foresight is the instruction manual for navigating the future’s chaos. Only his manual doesn’t give you a single design—it lays out multiple possibilities.

Frank Diana’s Map of the Future

Diana’s core idea is simple: stop predicting one future and start preparing for many different possibilities. He calls the method possibility chains. Picture them as dominoes. One disruption triggers another, then another. Generative AI enters the office, hiring patterns shift, training budgets move, spans of control widen, real estate needs shrink, tax bases wobble, regulations evolve. Each trigger is a link in a chain, and together they form a picture of how the future might branch.

This is what makes Diana distinct. He isn’t interested in trend lists that sit in slide decks; he’s interested in how trends connect, converge, multiply and amplify. Foresight isn’t prophecy; it’s practice. Leaders rehearse possible branches the way pilots run simulators—so when turbulence comes, muscle memory kicks in.

How the Past Informs the Future with Archeologist and Futurist Janna Jokela

What can a buried city, and ancient materials teach us about building a better tomorrow? On this episode, we connect the deep past with the long future. We're joined by Janna Jokela, a futurist and archaeologist who sees the remnants of ancient civilizations not just as historical artifacts, but as a map for our future. 

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***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.

When Time Became Geography, #5

The world’s most powerful weapon in the 18th century wasn’t a cannon, a fleet, or a fortress. It was a clock. Not the kind that told you when to put the kettle on — the kind that decided whether your king’s treasure ships arrived in port or rested on the sea bed. A carpenter with a stopwatch ended up doing what navies and kings could not: he made the oceans predictable.

Clocks don’t usually win empires. But then again, most clocks don’t redraw the map of the world – on time.

The Scilly Naval Disaster: Longitude's Bloody Lesson

In October 1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, one of Britain’s most celebrated naval commanders, was sailing home from Gibraltar at the head of a great fleet. The journey had been brutal: storms, poor visibility, overcast skies that blotted out the stars. Latitude — north and south — they could measure. Longitude — east and west — they guessed. And guesswork at sea is gambling with death.

As the fleet approached England, the officers believed they were safely in the English Channel. In reality, they were dozens of miles off course, bearing straight for the Isles of Scilly — a rocky graveyard southwest of Cornwall.

On the night of October 22, the catastrophe unfolded.

• HMS Association, Shovell’s flagship, struck the rocks off Gilstone Ledge and sank in minutes. All 1,400 men aboard drowned.

• HMS Eagle, HMS Romney, and HMS Firebrand also ran into the rocks. Hundreds more perished.

• Survivors described chaos: the sea boiling with wreckage, men clinging to timbers, cries vanishing into the roar of the waves.

In a single night, between 1,600–2,000 sailors died — not by cannon fire, but by navigational error.

The disaster was a national humiliation. Britain’s most advanced navy had been defeated by the complexity of geography. Insurance markets trembled, trade partners panicked, families from Portsmouth to Plymouth mourned. Admiral Shovell’s body was later found washed ashore.

The Scilly Disaster laid bare a cruel truth: latitude without longitude doesn’t get you where you want to go. Confidence on one axis meant nothing without accuracy on the other. This was the disaster that pushed Parliament, in 1714, to establish the Longitude Prize. The empire needed a solution, or the seas would keep collecting bodies.

Complexity, Optimism and the Sixth Great Transition, #2

“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.

Polyintelligence and the Sixth Great Transition, #1

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.

When Speed Becomes the System

Speed is no longer an attribute. It is the architecture of our reality.

We once built systems that moved at the pace of human time—defined by breath, dialogue, daylight, and deliberation. But we now inhabit a world animated by digital time, where light-speed communication and machine reflexes shape the tempo of everything from stock markets to supply chains to social movements.

As speed increases, it doesn't merely accelerate outcomes—it alters the structure of experience. Jobs evolve not because their tasks have changed, but because the tempo of the environment has. Organizations flatten not from ideology, but from necessity—hierarchies simply can't keep up. Governance strains, not because we lack laws, but because legislative cycles lag behind technological cycles. Warfare becomes unrecognizable not due to new weapons alone, but because the window for response has collapsed.

Speed transforms not just what we do, but who we are allowed to be in systems that no longer pause.

This is where polyintelligence offers a path forward—not as a philosophy, but as a design requirement. It recognizes what the human nervous system alone cannot bear: that in a world of instantaneous interactions and exponential complexity, no single form of intelligence is sufficient.

We must now orchestrate a symphony of intelligences:

Cognitive intelligence (human insight and intuition) provides ethics, meaning, and emotional discernment.

Computational intelligence (AI, automation, algorithms) offers the reflexes we no longer possess.

Ecological intelligence (nature’s cycles and systems thinking) reminds us that not everything should be fast—that resilience lives in rhythms, not just reactions.

Ethical intelligence provides the guardrails—the boundary conditions of responsibility in a world of instantaneous capability.

Relational intelligence—our capacity for trust, dialogue, and interdependence—enables us to collaborate across human and machine networks alike.

Speed breaks what is linear. Polyintelligence restores what is coherent.

It enables a new form of human-AI teaming—not one where machines replace humans, but where machines extend humans into domains where we were never designed to operate at pace. When algorithms decide in milliseconds, and humans consider in minutes, it is no longer a matter of speed alone—it is a matter of orchestration. The challenge is not just to go faster, but to go together, at the right tempo, in the right domain, for the right reason.

In the 20th century, strategy was about position and force. In the 21st, strategy is about tempo and alignment.

The future belongs to those who can synchronize across time dimensions—human time, digital time, and future time—while weaving together intelligence across every available form.

Speed may change everything. But polyintelligence is how we change with it—without losing ourselves.

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist, Lecturer and Humorist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***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.

Flourishing in the Age of Acceleration

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In the age of acceleration, our most pressing question is no longer "what is possible" but rather, "what is aligned with our purpose?" We are hurtling into the future—fueled by AI with superintelligent algorithms, real-time data streams, autonomous machines, and digital ecosystems—without a clearly defined destination. As a futurist, I believe the central crisis of our era is not technological—it is philosophical. We lack a shared vision of human flourishing. And without that vision, we risk optimizing ourselves into obsolescence.

The Future’s Broken Navigation System

When I drive my Jeep into the mountains, I set a destination and follow the best route. But the future doesn’t work that way. Its navigation system takes in innovations from science and technology, mixes them with geopolitical shifts, economic trends, social turbulence, environmental calamities, philosophies and consumer whims—then throws in a few historical earthquakes like pandemics, wars, and financial crises. It outputs… what, exactly?

That’s the problem. We’ve built a machine for moving faster, but not for choosing where to go. Our maps are precise. Our routes are efficient. But the destination field is empty.

This absence of direction has consequences. We increasingly treat the future as something to "react" to, rather than "design". But the future is not a land to be discovered—it is a construct to be authored. And if we don’t input human flourishing into the system, the default settings—profit, speed, efficiency—will drive us toward outcomes we never intended.

The Future of Happiness - The Finland Formula with Futurist Amos Taylor

Welcome to The Finland Formula, in this episode we explore why this Nordic nation has been ranked the happiest country in the world for eight consecutive years—and what the rest of the world can learn from it. We dive deep into Finland’s long-term investments in education, its world-class digital infrastructure, and robust social services that coexists with high global competitiveness. From trust in government to a balanced work-life culture, from equality to a profound connection with nature (and yes, even saunas!), we unpack how Finland built a resilient, future-ready society. Join us for a thoughtful conversation on the policies, culture, and values behind the Finnish model of well-being.

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***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.

A Bigger View of the Future, with Futurist Roger Spitz

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation that dives deep into the future. Today, we're tackling the big questions: from the perceived biases of AI in sustainability to the anxieties that keep business executives up at night. We'll explore the seismic shift in corporate engagement with politics, the exhilarating yet perplexing journey of AI growth, and the crucial balance between hyped and under-hyped AI capabilities. Join us as we navigate the complexities of future trends, challenge prevailing mental paradigms, and seek answers to the pervasive sense of pessimism that often overshadows our potential for a better future.

*I use AI in all my work.

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Futurist at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***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.