Today we stand at a peculiar intersection: artificial intelligence, the stubborn laws of financial cycles, and the quiet existential tremor running beneath the modern workforce.
In his February 2026 memo, AI Hurtles Ahead, Howard Marks offers a sober look at our technological moment. After consulting with leading technologists and Anthropic’s Claude, Marks concluded that AI is not merely retrieving information — it is synthesizing, reasoning, accelerating.
One contact described it perfectly: AI is not a “faster horse.” It is the automobile.
The scale of capital flooding into data centers and compute infrastructure reflects that belief.
But while the technology is new, the deeper human questions are ancient.
And they have been asked before.
Every transformative innovation begins with what Hyman Minsky called a “displacement” — a shock that alters expectations and pulls capital forward.
Railroads.
Telecom.
The internet.
Housing.
Now AI.
The pattern is nearly timeless: enthusiasm → capital surge → overbuild → disappointment → consolidation → durable winners.
The capital cycle has not been repealed by code. Excess investment compresses future returns. If AI revenue proves partially circular, or demand lags infrastructure, overcapacity will follow.
As Charlie Munger reminded us: trees don’t grow to the sky.
But beneath the capital cycle lies something more delicate than margins.
It is the question of work itself.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology and compounding would eventually solve the “economic problem” — the struggle for subsistence. He imagined his grandchildren working fifteen hours a week.
But he foresaw danger.
If material scarcity disappeared, he asked, what would become of people trained only to strive? Might we suffer a “nervous breakdown” — not from poverty, but from purposelessness?
Nearly a century later, that question feels less hypothetical.
We have built identities around productivity. We measure our worth by output. Our calendars are full. Our metrics are optimized. Our downtime exists to recharge us for further effort.
And now machines are learning to perform measurable tasks faster and better than we can.
If efficiency becomes abundant, what anchors human meaning?
This is not a macro question.
It is a philosophical one.
In 1891 — at the height of the Industrial Revolution — Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum. It was not anti-technology. It was not anti-capital. It was a defense of something deeper: the dignity of the human person.
Leo warned that when labor is treated purely as a commodity — when the worker becomes merely an instrument of production — society corrodes. Economic systems must serve the person, not reduce the person to a function within the system.
That warning feels freshly relevant.
AI is extraordinarily powerful. It can optimize, accelerate, compress cost curves. But if we evaluate its success purely by productivity metrics while ignoring its effect on human dignity and meaning, we risk repeating the very error Leo diagnosed during industrialization.
Technology is not neutral. It reshapes incentives. And incentives shape souls.
Nearly a century later, in Laborem Exercens (1981), John Paul II expanded the argument. He insisted that work is not merely a means of survival or economic exchange. Work is one of the primary ways a human being expresses creativity, responsibility, and participation in the world.
He made a crucial distinction: the “objective” dimension of work (output, productivity, measurable results) must never eclipse the “subjective” dimension — the development of the person who performs it.
In plain English: production is secondary. Formation is primary.
If AI reduces the objective dimension of work — performing analysis, drafting text, optimizing logistics — we are left staring directly at the subjective question:
Who are we becoming?
If we define ourselves only by what we produce, automation will feel like erasure.
If we understand work as participation in something larger — as stewardship, as creativity, as responsibility — then automation may free us to deepen that participation rather than replace it.
The crisis is not technological.
It is anthropological.
The German philosopher Josef Pieper, writing in 1948, diagnosed a different but related problem: “total work.” In such a society, even rest exists only to restore us for more productivity.
Leisure becomes instrumental. Human beings become functionaries.
Pieper argued that true leisure is not laziness or distraction. It is an inner condition — the capacity to step back, to contemplate, to experience awe, to encounter reality beyond utility.
Without leisure properly understood, culture decays. And without culture, prosperity becomes sterile.
If AI assumes more of the measurable tasks, the competitive advantage of the human person may shift toward precisely what resists measurement: moral judgment, aesthetic sensibility, relational trust, wisdom.
Leisure is not a luxury.
It is the training ground for those capacities.
Robert Pirsig captured this beautifully:
“The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things.”
Every technological revolution forces a mirror on society.
The external machine exposes the internal orientation.
If we are fragile, we will panic.
If we are overlevered, we will overbuild.
If we have forgotten why we work, we will feel displaced.
The capital cycle may oscillate every few years.
The human cycle compounds daily.
No one can declare definitively whether AI valuations are rational optimism or speculative excess.
Do not go all-in.
Do not stay all-out.
Participate prudently. Respect the possibility of overcapacity. Respect the possibility of transformation.
Balance is not cowardice. It is durability.
If AI commoditizes data and accelerates analysis, advantage migrates toward:
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Assessing character
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Understanding incentives
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Exercising moral judgment
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Navigating ambiguity
Machines process information.
Humans must decide what information is for.
That distinction will matter more than ever.
Favor companies that use technology to augment people rather than discard them.
Favor institutions that build trust rather than extract attention.
Favor enterprises that recognize that workers and customers are not disposable inputs but participants in a shared endeavor.
The most durable moats in history have been built not merely on efficiency, but on earned trust — what might be called a seamless web of deserved credibility.
That is not theology.
It is long-term economics.
AI may indeed be the automobile of our era.
But the more important question is whether we become better drivers — or merely faster passengers.
Leo XIII warned that systems must serve the human person.
John Paul II reminded us that work forms the worker.
Keynes warned of abundance without purpose.
Pieper urged us to reclaim leisure as culture.
Technology will accelerate.
Capital will overshoot.
Markets will cycle.
The deeper regime change is internal.
If we recover a vision of the human person that is larger than output, automation may become liberation.
If we do not, no amount of compute will save us from ourselves.
The cycle called yourself is still the only one that compounds without limit.