What happens when AI takes all skilled labor?

Not some skilled labor.
All of it.

Coding.
Design.
Editing.
Writing.
Marketing.
Music.
Video production.
Research.
Even strategy execution.

Instant. Infinite. Nearly free.

At first, this sounds terrifying.

Because for most of history, skill was the moat.

If you could do something difficult, you had leverage.
If you could produce what others couldn’t, you had value.

But every major technological shift destroys one form of scarcity and creates another.

The calculator made arithmetic abundant.

Google made information abundant.

Social media made publishing abundant.

AI is making execution abundant.

So what becomes scarce?

Taste.

Not taste as in preference.

Taste as in judgment.

The ability to look at ten options and know which one feels true.

The ability to know:

• what to say
• what not to say
• what matters
• what resonates
• what feels human
• what feels alive

Rick Rubin once said:

“I have no technical ability. I know nothing about music. I get paid for my taste.”

At first glance, that sounds absurd.

How could taste possibly be more valuable than technical skill?

Because technical skill only determines whether something can be made.

Taste determines whether it should exist at all.

Rubin wasn’t paid to operate equipment.

He was paid to recognize greatness before everyone else did.

Steve Jobs built Apple on the same principle.

The technology mattered.
But what separated Apple was judgment.

What to simplify.
What to remove.
What to obsess over.
What experience felt intuitive before customers could even articulate it.

Anyone can add features.

Taste is knowing what to leave out.

Seth Godin made a similar point when he said:

“People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.”

AI can generate products endlessly.

But meaning?
Meaning still requires human discernment.

Even Peter Drucker hinted at this decades ago:

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product fits him and sells itself.”

That isn’t execution.

That’s perception.

That’s sensitivity.

That’s taste.

And Alvin Toffler may have seen this coming before any of them.

In Future Shock and The Third Wave, he argued that technological acceleration would eventually create overwhelming abundance.

The challenge would no longer be access to information.

The challenge would become filtering, interpretation, and decision-making.

Not producing more.

Choosing better.

AI may become the ultimate expression of that prediction.

Not because it removes creation.

But because it floods the world with infinite creation.

Which makes discernment exponentially more valuable.

Because in a world of infinite outputs…

the scarce skill is no longer producing.

It’s deciding.

And that may become the most valuable skill in the AI era.

Because when everyone can generate anything…

the bottleneck shifts from creation to selection.

The winners won’t be the people who can make more.

They’ll be the people who can recognize what’s worth making.

And that applies to everything.

Business.

Marketing.

Hiring.

Branding.

Storytelling.

Leadership.

Even relationships.

AI may automate competence.

But competence was never the highest level.

The highest level was always discernment.

Knowing what not to build.

Knowing what not to say.

Knowing what feels alive before the market does.

That’s taste.

Ironically, the more artificial intelligence advances…

the more valuable human sensitivity becomes.

Not labor.

Not effort.

Not even knowledge.

Taste.

Because in a world where everyone has access to the same tools…

your ability to choose differently becomes the real advantage.

AI makes creation abundant.

Taste decides what deserves to exist.