The AI says yes. The human says no.
AI agents are about to make managers of us all. The job that won’t scale is the one they can’t teach us: knowing what to keep and what to kill.
In my first year of design school, I pinned 11 boards to the studio wall and stood back, pleased with myself. I was certain most of them were good. My professor walked the line, and by the end I understood that most were mediocre, two were genuinely bad, and one, maybe, held a kernel worth keeping.
It was the most useful afternoon of my education. Not for the work I’d made, but for the work of taking it down.
Learning why the bad ideas were bad, and why the survivor wasn’t, was the whole point. That is how you build a critic. I have spent the rest of my career on the other side of that wall: as a creative director and now as an investor, where the boards are pitch decks and the stakes are rather higher.
I’ve been thinking about that wall a lot lately.
About 18 months ago I argued that taste would become the scarcest resource. Since then, everyone seems to have adopted the word — far fewer have tried to define it.
