The New Scarcity: Taste

There is a quiet assumption that tends to sit underneath most conversations about artificial intelligence. It is that what is changing, above all else, is the way things are made. Machines will write, design, analyse and produce at a speed and scale that is far beyond what humans can match, and so the natural question becomes what people are left to do. This way of thinking is understandable, but it is also incomplete. It focuses on production, as though the most important part of culture has always been making more things, faster.

But if you look more closely, production has never really been the rare part. What has always mattered just as much, if not more, is judgement. What is worth making in the first place, what is worth paying attention to, and what is worth keeping once it exists. These are not technical skills in the usual sense. They are closer to forms of judgement, and judgement is where taste comes in.

Taste is often treated as something superficial, connected to style or personal preference. But in practice it is something more serious than that. It is the ability to tell the difference between what is simply fine and what actually feels right. Between what is just another version of something and what feels like it could not really be any other way. It is less about having strong opinions and more about developing a sensitivity to quality, proportion and restraint.

The arrival of tools that can generate almost anything changes the environment in which this judgement happens. When making something becomes easy, the world stops being limited by scarcity and starts being defined by excess. You are no longer struggling to find enough ideas or material. You are faced with too many of them. And in that situation, the question is no longer how to create, but how to choose.

This is where taste becomes more important, not less. Because when everything can be produced, production itself stops being a marker of value. What matters instead is what gets selected. Without some form of judgement, everything starts to look the same. Not because everything is equally good, but because nothing is being filtered in a meaningful way.

This is not just a cultural issue in the narrow sense. It shows up in everyday life as well. The things you listen to, read, wear, eat, and surround yourself with are all small acts of selection. Most of the time these choices feel automatic, but together they shape the kind of environment you live in. They decide the tone of your days more than most large decisions do.

Taste, in this sense, is not about being fashionable or refined. It is about being aware of these choices instead of drifting through them. It is the ability to notice when you are choosing something because it is genuinely right for you, and when you are choosing it because it is simply the easiest or most available option. Over time, that difference matters more than it first appears.

The rise of artificial intelligence makes this even more relevant. As more of the making is handled by systems, the role of the person shifts towards deciding. Not just what is produced, but what is worth engaging with at all. That requires a kind of judgement that cannot be automated in the same way. It requires attention, comparison and a willingness to reject things that are perfectly adequate but not quite right.

In that sense, taste becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessity. It is what allows you to move through a world of constant output without being overwhelmed by it. It gives structure to abundance by introducing selection. And without selection, abundance does not feel rich. It just feels noisy.

Most people already practise taste without naming it. It is there in small decisions that do not seem important on their own, but add up over time. The way you choose to spend your attention, the way you shape your environment, the way you decide what to keep close to you and what to ignore. These are all forms of curation, whether or not they are treated that way.

The real shift, then, is not that taste suddenly becomes new. It is that it becomes unavoidable. When everything can be made, the ability to decide what is worth keeping becomes one of the only meaningful points of difference left. And that makes it worth taking seriously, not as an abstract idea, but as a practice that runs through almost everything you do.

What matters, increasingly, is not what can be produced.

It is what you are able to choose.