Taste in the Age of Technology
AI can automate everything, except the sense that knows what matters.
In 1504, Isabella d'Este stood before yet another failed commission. The painting was technically perfect, every brushstroke precise, every proportion correct. She studied it, then wrote to the artist: "Again. The feeling is not yet right."
She couldn't paint. But she could see what wanted to exist.
This is taste: the aesthetic sense that recognizes when reality has shifted but the forms haven't caught up. It's not preference or sophistication. It's the ability to feel the friction between what is and what's trying to become.
Every breakthrough technology brings this friction.
When automobiles arrived, we called them "horseless carriages." We built them high like carriages, with whip holders and lamps. It took twenty years before someone felt the wrongness, before cars became low, fast, shaped by wind rather than tradition.
When television came, we pointed cameras at radio announcers. When computers arrived, we made them imitate typewriters. When the internet emerged, we built digital brochures.
Each time, it took taste to recognize the new technology’s own aesthetic, its own way of wanting to be.
Right now, we're living through the largest technological shift in human history, and we're making the same mistake.
We use AI to write emails faster. To automate expense reports. To generate performance reviews no one reads. We're so busy making the old world efficient that we can't see the new world trying to be born.
This discomfort is information.
When you see AI writing cover letters that sound identical, automating status updates already visible in dashboards, generating reports that explain why guesses didn't match reality, you’re not seeing efficiency. You're seeing a desperate attempt to preserve forms that only existed because of previous limitations.
Taste recognizes which constraints were essential and which were circumstantial.
Communication is essential. Email is circumstantial.
Decision-making is essential. Meetings are circumstantial.
Understanding is essential. Reports are circumstantial.
The person with taste doesn’t analyze this. They feel it, like a chef knowing when to stop kneading dough, like a musician hearing the perfect note before it's played.
Taste becomes more valuable during technological revolutions; it’s the only faculty that perceives what wants to emerge before it has a name.
Surface-level thinkers see the obvious change (more books! faster factories!). Those with taste perceive the deeper transformation in human experience that technology enables. They feel the aesthetic pull of possibility.
We’re at such a moment now.
AI isn’t just another tool to optimize the familiar. It’s a fundamental shift in what's possible, as profound as writing, printing, or electricity. But we're so trapped in horseless carriage thinking that we can’t see what wants to emerge.
The question isn’t "How can AI make us more efficient?"
The question is: "What forms of human potential are now possible that weren’t before?"
Only taste can answer this. Not through frameworks or strategies, but through the ability to sense when possibility and form finally align. To feel the rightness when they meet, and the wrongness when they don’t.
Developing taste isn’t about refinement or traditional education. It’s about the courage to trust what you feel over what you know. To recognize discomfort when others see progress. To sense what’s trying to emerge while others optimize what’s dying.
In every revolution, most people automate the past. They perfect the irrelevant.
But a few — those with taste — see something else. They see the sculpture in the stone. They hear the symphony in the silence. They feel the future wanting to be born.
And then, like Isabella d'Este with her painters, they help bring it into existence. Not through their own hands, but through their ability to recognize it when it appears. To say "again" when it's wrong and "yes" when it's finally right.
In the age of AI, everything can be generated, automated, optimized.
Everything except this: the aesthetic sense that knows what matters before it’s obvious to everyone else. The faculty that distinguishes the eternal from the obsolete. The taste that recognizes not what is, but what’s trying to become.
This is the only competitive advantage that matters now. The only faculty that sees.
Taste.