Taste

Taste is not about aesthetics. It’s not about knowing which wine pairs with which dish or having opinions about furniture. Those are symptoms. The actual skill is deeper.

Taste is the ability to discern what matters from what doesn’t. In a world of infinite options, it’s knowing which one to choose - and more importantly, which thousand to ignore.

This has always been useful. It’s about to become essential.

When AI can generate anything - code, content, strategies, designs, entire products - the bottleneck is no longer creation. It’s selection. The person who can look at a thousand AI-generated options and immediately feel which one is right has a skill that no algorithm can replicate. Because the algorithm generated all thousand. It has no preference. It has no sense of what matters. That’s your job.

And here’s the part most people miss: taste isn’t just professional. It’s personal. The choices you make about how to live - what to pay attention to, what to ignore, how to spend your time, what to believe, who to trust - these are all expressions of taste. In the age of AI, those choices define you more than your skills ever will.

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The Overabundance Problem

We used to live in a world of scarcity. Information was hard to find. Products were expensive to build. Content took effort to create. The challenge was access - getting enough of the right inputs to make good decisions.

That world is gone.

Now the problem is the opposite. There is too much of everything. Too much information. Too much content. Too many tools, frameworks, opinions, takes, strategies, and options. Every platform, every scroll, every notification is competing for the same finite resource: your attention.

AI made this exponentially worse. When the cost of creating something approaches zero, the volume of creation explodes. Most of it is noise. Competent, polished noise - but noise. The signal-to-noise ratio is collapsing across every domain.

In this environment, the old metrics of intelligence don’t help you. Knowing more doesn’t make you better. Processing faster doesn’t give you an edge. The edge comes from knowing what to ignore. From being able to walk through a flood of information and pick up the one thing that actually matters.

That’s taste.

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Taste Is Identity

Here’s where this gets philosophical, and I make no apology for it.

Your taste is the sum of your choices. Not just the big ones - career, relationships, where to live. The small ones too. What you read. What you skip. What catches your attention. What bores you. What you think is beautiful and what you think is garbage.

These choices, accumulated over a lifetime, form a pattern. That pattern is you. Philosopher Friedrich Schiller argued that aesthetic taste forms the core of identity - it shapes how you see yourself in the world. Recent research confirms this intuitively: people perceive changes in someone’s taste as genuinely identity-altering. If you switch from loving classical music to loving pop, people don’t just think your preferences changed. They think you changed.

This matters because real taste - the kind that’s actually valuable - is purely individual. It cannot be crowdsourced. It cannot be optimized by committee. The moment you start choosing things because everyone else chose them, you’ve lost it. You’re running on consensus, not taste.

True taste will get you weird looks. It has to. If every choice you make is legible and approved by your peer group, you’re not exercising taste. You’re performing conformity. The person with genuine taste makes choices others don’t understand - until, sometimes, they do. And sometimes they never do. That has to be okay.

Bourdieu argued that taste is social - shaped by class and culture, not individual at all. He’s partially right. Your starting point is shaped by where you come from. But where you go from there is yours. The skill isn’t having taste handed to you. It’s developing it through deliberate, conscious choices that are yours alone.

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Taste in the AI Era

In the age of AI, taste expresses itself through a new set of choices that most people aren’t thinking about carefully enough.

How will you use AI? Will you use it at all? For what? To what extent? Will you let it draft your thinking or only check it? Will you use it for creative work or keep that human? Which model will you use? Does it matter to you if it’s open-source? Do you care where your data lives?

These aren’t technical questions. They’re taste questions. They reveal what you value, what you’re willing to trade, and how you think about the relationship between human effort and machine output.

The person who lets AI do everything without thinking about it has no taste. They’ve abdicated the most important choices of their professional life to convenience. The person who refuses AI entirely out of principle also has no taste - they’ve substituted ideology for discernment.

Taste is in the middle. It’s the conscious, thoughtful, sometimes uncomfortable process of deciding: here, AI helps me. Here, it doesn’t. Here, the human effort matters. Here, it’s wasted. These boundaries are different for everyone. They should be. That’s the point.

The Narrative & Distribution Steward from the Jobs of the Future series is a vivid example - but taste is essential for every role in that framework. The Clarity Steward needs taste to know which strategic direction is worth pursuing. The Execution Orchestrator needs it to know when output is good enough. The Integrity Steward needs it to sense when a system is subtly wrong before the data confirms it.

The Narrative Steward just makes the case most visible. AI can generate unlimited content. Every company can produce professional marketing materials in minutes. The noise is deafening. The Steward’s entire job is cutting through it - knowing which story is real, which angle resonates, which channel matters. That’s taste applied to narrative. Without it, you’re just adding to the flood.

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How It Develops

Taste isn’t innate. But it can’t be taught through instruction either.

It develops through conscious choice-making. Every time you encounter options and deliberately choose - not defaulting, not following the crowd, not optimizing for what’s easy - you strengthen the muscle. Every time you think about why you chose what you chose, you refine it.

It develops through exposure. The person with broad, deep exposure to different domains, cultures, ideas, and perspectives develops richer taste than the person who stays in one lane. This is why the intelligence article before this one matters - cross-domain thinking feeds taste. The wider your inputs, the more refined your filter becomes.

It develops through living in the moment. This sounds soft, but it isn’t. Taste requires presence. You can’t discern what matters if you’re not paying attention. The person scrolling mindlessly is not developing taste. The person who pauses, notices, and asks themselves “do I actually care about this?” is.

It develops through taking life seriously enough to contemplate it. Not grimly serious. But seriously enough to believe that your choices matter. That how you spend your attention is a real decision with real consequences. That the difference between a life lived with taste and a life lived on autopilot is the difference between meaning and noise.

And it develops through getting it wrong. Taste without failure is just luck. The choices that turned out poorly, the instincts that were off, the times you committed to something that didn’t work - those are the experiences that sharpen discernment. You learn what matters partly by discovering what doesn’t.

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What Failure Looks Like

The most common failure is defaulting. Choosing whatever is popular, whatever is recommended, whatever everyone else is doing. This isn’t taste. It’s the absence of it. And in a world where AI can optimize for popularity, defaulting makes you indistinguishable from an algorithm.

Another failure is rigidity. The person who found their taste at 25 and never updated it. Taste that doesn’t evolve becomes dogma. The world changes. What mattered yesterday might not matter tomorrow. Taste must be alive - constantly tested, occasionally revised, never frozen.

Another is performative taste. Choosing things not because you actually value them but because they signal sophistication or belonging. This is Bourdieu’s trap - using taste as social currency rather than genuine discernment. People can feel the difference. Performative taste is brittle. Genuine taste is magnetic.

And there’s overthinking - analyzing every choice until you can’t make any. Taste requires some courage. Sometimes “because it feels right” is a valid reason, even in a data-driven world. The person who needs a spreadsheet to justify every decision has outsourced their taste to metrics.

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The Self-Assessment

You have taste if your choices form a coherent pattern that’s recognizably yours - not a copy of someone else’s, not an optimization for approval, not a default.

You have taste if you can walk into a room full of options and feel drawn to the right one before you can fully explain why - and then explain it when asked.

You have taste if some of your choices confuse other people, and you’re comfortable with that.

You’re at risk if you can’t remember the last time you chose something that surprised even you. If every decision feels safe and validated. If your life looks optimized but not yours.

The test: take away the algorithms, the recommendations, the social proof. What would you choose? If you don’t know, that’s where the work begins.

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This is Part 5 of the Skills of the Future series, a companion to the Jobs of the Future series. With this article, the series is complete - for now. As the landscape shifts and new patterns emerge, I’ll add new skills when they earn their place here.