Human Value in the AI Era

My kids are growing up in a world where AI can write their essays, generate their art, and answer almost any question instantly. When I talk to executives, I realize they share an underlying anxiety: what's left for humans to do?

I think there's a clear answer.

The Wrong Question

Comparing AI and human capabilities within a task directly can be depressing. AI can write code, draft emails, summarize documents, generate images, etc... All of it, faster than any human.

Many people stop there and ask what humans can still do better than AI, and this is the wrong question because it frames humans and AI as competitors in the same race when they're not running the same race at all.

AI is extraordinarily good at generation, at producing options and variations and content and analysis. What it cannot do is know what's worth keeping. It has no taste.

That's a human quality, and it's not going anywhere.

Here's an example. A marketing team uses AI to generate fifty tagline options and the taglines are competent, some are even clever, but which one actually captures what the brand is about? Which one will resonate with real customers?

That requires something AI doesn't have, which is a sense of taste.

Not taste in the trivial sense, not "I like blue better than red." I mean the deep, accumulated, hard-to-articulate sense of what works and what doesn't. The kind of judgment that comes from years of experience, from domain expertise in your particular industry, from understanding humans because you are one, from having been wrong enough times to develop instincts about being right.

I call this Integrated Taste: the human capacity to direct creative and innovative work by integrating sensory experience, embodied knowledge, cultural context, and life wisdom in ways that cannot be fully articulated or delegated to AI.

Why AI Can't Get There

AI optimists will argue this is just advanced pattern matching. Give AI enough examples, they say, and it will learn taste too.

I don't think so, for two reasons.

First, taste is emergent. It arises from the combination of a vast reservoir of lived experience, the brain's ability to surface relevant context in surprising ways, and the judgment to know what to do with that context. Asking "which neuron contains your taste?" is nonsensical because taste is not decomposable into rules or patterns that can be trained. It requires something like a human brain's complexity and a human life's experience. (btw - I'm not saying AI will NEVER have taste. I'm saying that our sense of taste is related to the complexity of our brains, and we are many decades away from simulating the complexity of a human brain.)

Second, taste involves rule-breaking. Picasso said: "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist." Pattern-following can be approximated, but knowing that this is the moment to violate the principle and this is how to violate it requires feeling the friction between the rule and the specific situation. That's taste.

Consider: a color scheme reminds you of your grandfather's workshop and that memory, warm and specific and yours, inspires an ad campaign that connects childhood nostalgia with a modern product. The guiding vision is tied to deep, mostly inexplicable feelings about a personal experience and it might even violate design principles. But if your taste is strong enough, it resonates with others who share similar experiences.

This is why taste is connected to empathy. Your taste is calibrated by being human among humans. AI has seen the data but it hasn't lived the life.

What This Means

For my kids: the skills worth building are the ones that require being human. Use all your senses. Notice what feels good and what doesn't. Ask why. Make things and get feedback and develop opinions about quality and refine them through experience. AI will make execution easy but the hard part, the valuable part, is knowing what's worth executing and why.

For leaders: the companies that thrive with AI will be the ones that build AI systems to amplify human judgment. The failures will treat humans as a bottleneck. AI is a power tool and power without judgment is expensive chaos.

We're not in a race against machines. We're a collaboration that requires us to be more human, not less. The capacity for integrated taste, for knowing what matters and what resonates and what's worth keeping, that's not going anywhere.