This is the last edition of Staying Human with Tech.

On February 23, I join BNY (The Bank of New York Mellon) as a Senior Vice President and Agile Coach. It’s a role I’m excited about, but it comes with something that matters here: my new employment agreement reasonably restricts my ability to write publicly on work-related topics. I can’t go halfway on this newsletter, and I can’t do it with one hand tied behind my back. So I’m pulling the plug on this writing project, which means this is goodbye in this form.

Writing this newsletter and receiving your comments has been truly fulfilling. Every issue tried to help people stay thoughtful and human amid accelerating change. I’m proud of that, and I’m grateful you were along for this ride.

Before I power this newsletter down, I want to leave you with some final insights. The labor market is sending some signals right now. It’s an ocean we are all swimming in, and as someone who grew up near the ocean, I pay attention to the tides.

Numbers are cooling, and have been for a while

According to Revelio Labs’ public labor data, total U.S. job openings fell nearly 12% year-over-year as of January 2026. Meanwhile, the hiring rate has dropped to roughly 21.5% on an annualized basis — a significant fall from the 30%+ levels we saw during the 2021–2022 boom. If labor numbers are not your thing, just look at the charts for Employment (January 2026), Job Openings (January 2026), and Hiring and Attrition (January 2026). Workers are staying put not because they love where they are, but because there are fewer places to go. None of this is panic-worthy on its own, but the trend lines have been consistently pointing in one direction for the better part of two years. (Thanks to reader, Jeffrey W for sharing this data. Also, apologies to my non-US readers. I didn’t have time to compile broader data sources, but the next segment may help.)

TL;DR – Find Safe Harbors

The macro picture on how we work is also shifting

A recent international survey (paper, presentation) of more than 5,000 CFOs, CEOs, and senior executives — coordinated across the U.S., UK, Germany, and Australia by Stanford’s Nick Bloom and colleagues — found that U.S. firms expect AI to add roughly 0.75 percentage points per year to productivity growth, nearly doubling the historical baseline. More sobering: those same executives predict a net employment decline of around 0.7%, primarily through reduced hiring — roughly 2 million jobs across the four countries. Interestingly, workers surveyed separately predicted far smaller impacts. Whether that reflects workers being more realistic, or simply having less visibility into what’s being planned in the corner offices, is a question worth pondering. (This isn’t the only such survey I’ve seen, just the most recent.)

TL;DR – Find Safe Harbors

Our AI future is imminent, turbulent, and more clouded

A few weeks ago, a well-regarded AI entrepreneur named Matt Shumer published a piece that’s been circulating widely — over 80 million views at last count: shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening. He makes a careful, honest case that AI capability has crossed a significant threshold in early 2026 that most people haven’t yet registered. It’s worth reading. But read it alongside the response from Paulo Carvão, a Harvard Senior Fellow writing in Forbes, who makes an equally important point: Shumer’s piece, for all its concern and insight, “reads at times like a sales pitch.” His practical advice — get hands-on with these tools, don’t wait — makes sense. But Carvão argues that framing a $20/month subscription as your primary defense against disruption misses something important. Other forces are always at play.

Both pieces are worth your time. Hold them together. The technology is real, the acceleration is real, and the urgency (and hype) is real. But so is the need for the kind of human-centered response that I’ve tried to share in this newsletter.

Pulling these three perspectives together

Taken together, these three signals — a cooling job market, executives quietly planning for fewer hires, accelerating AI capability, and a very public debate about what we should actually do about it — paint a picture worth viewing. Not to frighten you. But because the people who navigate change best are almost always the ones who saw it coming, thought critically about what they were hearing, and gave themselves time to respond thoughtfully. That combination of awareness and discernment is exactly what I’ve tried to provide in this newsletter and I’ve appreciated the discussions we’ve had on these topics.

I believe that staying human in a world being reshaped by technology isn’t just a nice idea. It’s a discipline. It’s a choice you have to make actively, over and over.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for the replies, the comments in social media, the moments in calls and conferences where someone said “I read your piece on that.” It meant more than you know.

Take care of yourselves and each other. Build community. Stay curious. Work together.

— Mark

P.S. You can still find me on social media and email. Let me know if you’ve found your safe harbor and where you share your own insights on staying human with tech. The conversations don’t have to stop — they just won’t have a regular publishing schedule attached.

P.P.S, Full disclosure, I worked with Claude.ai to write this article. I have a hard time saying goodbye and needed some help in pulling all these thoughts together.