In the Age of A.I., What Is Taste? And Do We Still Have It?
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In the Age of A.I., What Is Taste? And Do We Still Have It?
"In the AI age, taste will become even more important. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it. This emphasis on tasteful decision-making makes sense, given that A.I. is gradually democratizing technological production. With the newly powerful likes of Anthropic's Claude Code assistant, anyone can theoretically program anything."
"In the AI era, personal taste is the moat—'moat' being entrepreneur lingo for an unreplicable advantage, the thing that makes your company stand out above its competitors. Startups apparently need taste like A.I. needs data centers. By their definition, taste is inherently profitable; it is the ability to discern what will make the most money."
As artificial intelligence democratizes technological production, Silicon Valley has embraced 'taste' as a new buzzword and essential business strategy. Prominent technologists and entrepreneurs argue that taste—the ability to discern what will be profitable and what users need—has become the primary differentiator in an AI-dominated landscape. With tools like Claude Code enabling anyone to build software, the challenge shifts from technical capability to creative decision-making. Tech leaders define taste pragmatically as the capacity to choose winning concepts and convince users of product necessity. This emphasis reflects a fundamental shift: as AI commoditizes technical production, human judgment about what to build becomes the unreplicable competitive advantage that separates successful companies from failures.
Read at The New Yorker
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