🔮☀️ The AI economy; achieving optimism; blurring machine & human; future business models; peak car; bumper summer special++ #180

It is a bumper summer issue this week as it is a public holiday on Monday for many readers. Enjoy at your leisure.

Dept of the near future

✋ “The boundaries between body and machine, between mind and world, between standard, augmented and virtual realities, and between human and post-human…[are blurring]” says philosopher, Andy Clark. It will create “world marked more by possibility, fluidity, change and negotiability than by outdated images of fixed natures and capacities.” THOUGHT PROVOKING. (One of my favourite examples of how humans adapt through technology is in Vaclav Smil’s Energy & Civilization where he describes how the human colon is relatively smaller than those of other primates, primarily because our early technologies allowed us to switch to higher-quality, energy-dense foods.)

📈 Alibaba as a model of the future of business: “Alibaba’s special innovation, we realized, was that we were truly building an ecosystem: a community of organisms (businesses and consumers of many t…