The Human Economy

Why pottery and the throwing wheel are shaping the future of health, business & tech.

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Every now and then, this newsletter explores and explains how people take control of their health, now and in the future.

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It's been a while since I've had the time to write here. I was speaking all over the place, sometimes visiting countries with a 45° Celsius difference within 24 hours. Life was hectic and heavy, but super fun. I was tired and energised at the same time.

That doesn't mean I stopped thinking or writing. In fact, I've got some thought-provoking pieces lined up for you. So, let's send out the first one: The Human Economy.

The AI debate has a blind spot. And it's not small.

We've spent three years arguing about what artificial intelligence will replace. Jobs. Creativity. Expertise. The conversation has been almost entirely about subtraction — what gets taken away, who loses, what disappears. But while that argument dominates the room, something else is happening in the market. A second economy is forming. Not in opposition to automation. Almost because of it. Something that most organisations are not yet seeing clearly. And by the time they do, the early movers will already have built something they cannot easily copy.

The mistake most organisations are making isn't being too slow on AI. It's assuming there is only one game being played.

The Automation Economy

The Automation Economy doesn't need much introduction.

Its logic is simple and relentless: whatever can be systematised, will be. Whatever can be generated will be generated faster and cheaper than before. Content, code, analysis, design, customer service, financial advice — the list of domains being compressed is long and still growing. In this economy, the winners are whoever removes the most friction, scales the fastest, and drives the unit cost of output as close to zero as possible. Speed is the currency. Efficiency is the strategy. And the product, increasingly, is the shortcut itself.

This economy is real, it is accelerating, and any organisation not taking it seriously is already behind.

But here is the paradox hiding inside its success.

AI-driven experiences will be genuinely remarkable. Faster than any human. More patient than any human. Available at 3 am without complaint. Personalised in ways no human advisor, doctor, or customer service agent could ever match. The automated economy will deliver things that feel, by every measurable standard, better than what came before.

That is precisely where the blind spot hides.

And we have been here before. When social media arrived, it promised something real and delivered it: connection at scale, instantly, with anyone, anywhere. It worked. By every metric, it worked. And yet somewhere along the way — not suddenly, but gradually, then undeniably — people started feeling more alone than before. Not because social media was broken. Because it was optimised for connecting digitally rather than the connection itself. Likes instead of presence. Reach instead of belonging. The product delivered everything it promised. It just couldn't deliver the thing we didn't know we'd miss.

The automated economy is heading toward the same paradox.

When everything is personalised, we will quietly start to miss being truly known. When every answer is instant, we will start to miss the feeling that someone actually thought about us. When every interaction is frictionless, we will start to miss the meaning that only comes from something being difficult, deliberate, or rare. These are not needs we can anticipate easily. They tend to arrive as a vague dissatisfaction — a sense that something is missing that we cannot quite name.

Until we can. And then the market moves.

That movement already has a name. It is the Human Economy.

The Human Economy

The Human Economy isn't growing because automation fails.

It is growing because automation succeeds — and in doing so, makes certain things genuinely scarce for the first time. Trust, depth, presence, taste, accountability, serendipity — these are not features you can prompt-engineer at scale. They require time, judgment, and the kind of earned credibility that comes from a person actually being on the line for something. In the human economy, the winners are whoever can signal authenticity credibly, deliver depth consistently, and build the kind of relationship that makes switching feel like a loss.

This economy is also real. It is also accelerating. And most organisations have no strategy for it whatsoever.

The signals are already there.

The signals are already there. You just have to know what you're looking at.

No single data point proves the Human Economy. That's not how structural shifts work. They don't announce themselves. They show up first as scattered anomalies — things that seem unrelated until you find the thread connecting them. And right now, that thread is becoming visible across industries that have nothing obvious in common.

• In consumer culture, the global handicraft market is approaching $740 billion and accelerating. Art school enrolments are at record highs. Brands like Bottega Veneta and Loewe have quietly pivoted away from celebrity-driven campaigns toward stories about process, materials, and the human hands behind the product. These are not nostalgic gestures. They are responses to a market signal: when everything is instantly generated, the made thing gains value.

• In fashion, Paris Fashion Week 2025 marked a visible shift in tone. Labels like Miu Miu, Rabanne, and Courrèges moved away from spectacle and irony toward what critics called "new sincerity" — collections built around emotional vulnerability, narrative depth, and deliberate imperfection. The industry that has always been most sensitive to cultural temperature is sensing something changing.

• In digital culture, new formats are emerging that have no algorithmic logic — they exist purely to make people feel something real. Hopecore. Corecore. Unscripted reactions. Earnest, unpolished expressions of genuine emotion that spread not because they are optimised but because they are recognised. After years of "cringe" as the default register online, sincerity is staging a comeback. Not as a trend. As a need.

• In healthcare and wellbeing, the most forward-thinking operators are already distinguishing between what automation handles well — triage, monitoring, personalised protocols — and what it cannot replace: therapeutic alliance, genuine listening, community-based care, the kind of human presence that makes people feel held rather than processed.

None of these signals, taken alone, is conclusive. Together, they point in the same direction.

The Human Economy is not here yet at scale. But the conditions creating it are already in place. Consumer behaviour is shifting. Cultural tone is shifting. And market premiums are beginning to attach to things that cannot be generated on demand, to shopping models that are slower on purpose, to limits that stop tourism from turning cities into theme parks and to human mastery grounded in tradition.

So, where does this leave you?

Think about what people will genuinely pay a premium for in a world where everything can be generated on demand: attention that isn't split, rushed, or scripted. Curation with a real point of view. Transparency and accountability from someone who actually has skin in the game. Empathy with follow-through. Experiences that are live, physical, and impossible to replicate on a screen. Communities built around shared identity, shared rituals, shared progress.

AI can assist all of these. It cannot be any of them.

We are moving into an era where "handmade" won't just mean artisanal bread. It will mean human-made things. Human-led support. Human-authored perspective. Human-verified reality. Proof of human will become a value signal — not unlike the organic label, but for something harder to fake than a farming method. It will signal meaning.

That is the Human Economy: not anti-tech, but post-shortcut. It is the economy of depth. And depth, right now, is quietly becoming the scarcest thing in the market.

The organisations that see this early will not just survive the automation wave. They will build something on the other side of it that no algorithm can replicate. A good place to start: map where your model has gained efficiency and ask honestly what it gave up to get there. The answer will tell you exactly where the opportunity is.