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Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Pope Leo XIV greets a child from the popemobile while riding around St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican before his weekly general audience June 24, 2026. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

To a future of abundance?


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OSV News Filed Under: Commentary

A newsletter I read signs off the same way every time: “To a future of Abundance.” The writer, futurist Peter Diamandis, is one of our most fluent evangelists for what artificial intelligence is about to do for us, and I read him because he gives such confident voice to the optimism so much of our culture now takes for granted.

A recent dispatch promises a supersonic wave of it: a feature film generated on demand for the cost of a search query; a patient, brilliant tutor for every child on earth, free: Einstein himself to walk your daughter through relativity. And underneath it all, a question he tosses off almost in passing: when work becomes optional, where do meaning and dignity come from?

That question gives away an assumption. It treats work as a burden we will gladly set down once the machines can carry it, and dignity as something we must then source from elsewhere.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” begins from the opposite conviction. Work is not the cost we pay for dignity; it is one of the places our dignity is exercised and revealed. Leo stands in a long line here, back at least to Leo XIII, for whom the primacy of human labor over every mindset fixed on finance or productivity was a first principle. Through labor, our freedom, our creativity and our capacity for cooperation come into play.

I enjoy the prospect of rest as much as anyone, and the encyclical is no brief for drudgery. But to frame a future in which work is finally optional as pure liberation is to concede that the human person is, at bottom, a consumer to be satisfied rather than a maker and a participant in the building of something. Leo poses his whole encyclical as one question borrowed from Scripture: “What are we building?” A culture that cannot wait to stop building has already half-answered him.

The second promise unsettles me most: the free, brilliant, infinitely patient tutor. Who could be against a child anywhere having a teacher that costs them nothing? And yet listen to how easily the human teacher drops out of the sentence, as though the one who forms and educates were a mere container for the information that really mattered, now decanted into software.

This mistakes what happens when one person forms another. We are not formed by content delivered on our own optimized terms, but by dwelling with someone, reckoning not only with their thoughts but with how they think. Leo names the danger: the deepest risk of these tools is not that we mistake a machine for a person, but that we “may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.” A simulated friend has no limits for us to bear with, and so can never become a real friend; the simulated tutor can transmit, but it cannot dwell. The friction sold to us as a flaw is very often the better part of formation.

The entertainment promise hides the same trap in sweeter wrapping. A blockbuster generated for my mood and my taste sounds like a gift until you notice what it forecloses. Tastes that are only ever flattered never grow. If the machine always knows I like cotton candy and serves me cotton candy, my palate never stretches toward anything I did not already want. Real culture, like real teaching and real friendship, works on us by exceeding our preferences, handing us what we would not have chosen and would have been poorer for missing.

Underneath all three promises runs one confusion about where human grandeur comes from. Diamandis locates it in what we can build, scale and seize. Leo, taking his title from Mary’s Magnificat, insists that the magnificent humanity worth safeguarding is not constructed but received, as Mary received it, and then magnified in praise. Everything that looks like a limit, he writes — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — “tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.” Optimize the limit away, and you optimize away the better part of being a person, for it is exactly in our weakness that patience, mercy and love first find something to do.

None of this requires refusing the real goods on offer, and there are many; the encyclical itself rejects both naive enthusiasm and unfounded fear. But it asks us to keep the question open rather than let a slogan close it.

“To a future of Abundance,” the newsletter promises. It is an alluring word, which is exactly why it deserves scrutiny rather than applause. Abundance of what? At what cost? At whose expense? A future overflowing with frictionless entertainment, optional work and simulated companionship may be abundant in everything except the things that actually make us human: The labor that forms us, the people who resist our preferences, the limits through which love learns its trade.

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