Taste
Curation. Refusing. The editorial judgment that decides what is worth doing.
The feed picks your inputs and the model picks your phrasing, unless you decide, on purpose, what is worth doing in the first place.
The Human Premium
As AI absorbs the execution, the human side becomes the premium.
Not anti-AI. Not all-in. Use AI on the work machines should do, and protect the time for the rest.
When something is in abundance, demand moves to what stays scarce. As AI floods execution, the scarce part is human.
Doing the work used to be the hard part. Code, copy, decks, numbers: all of it is cheap now and getting cheaper.
The value does not vanish. It moves to what a machine cannot do well: the call you make, what you say no to, the room you are in, the life you have had.
So the move is not to automate yourself out. It is the third path: AI on the execution, people on the judgement.
The Five Axes.
What gains value as execution goes to zero.
Conviction
Calls made. Stakes taken. Defended opinions you would hold under public pressure.
A model hands you the average of the internet dressed as nuance. Only a person names the call publicly and stands behind it with the receipt.
Lore
Lived experience worth telling. An integrated life, captured, never staged.
The flex is the life, not the post about it. A lived life is the one input no AI can manufacture.
Synthesis
Original work. Connecting unrelated domains. Writing the framework first.
Reposting a summary is not thinking. Connecting a lesson from one world to a problem in another, and writing the rule down first, is.
Presence
Real rooms. Real people. The voltage of being fully there.
Parasocial reach is not the same as being in the room. The voltage of full attention, in person, is the thing a screen cannot fake.
What it rests on.
People judge warmth before competence
We size up whether someone means well before we size up whether they are any good. An argument that cuts against the grain has to feel warm before it gets to be clever.
Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu, A model of (often mixed) stereotype content, 2002 ↗Charisma can be taught
Managers trained in a set of specific behaviours were rated measurably more charismatic months later. Presence is a craft, not something you are born with.
Antonakis, Fenley and Liechti, Can charisma be taught? Tests of two interventions, 2011 ↗The new thing stops feeling new
Excitement drifts back to baseline whatever caused it. The novelty of a tool wears off and only its usefulness compounds. AI gets no exemption.
Brickman and Campbell, Hedonic relativism and planning the good society, 1971 ↗Price changes how good something actually feels
The same wine, labelled more expensive, did not just get rated higher. It registered differently in the brain. Value is partly made in the perceiver, not only in the product.
Plassmann, O'Doherty, Shiv and Rangel, Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness, 2008 ↗Stories move people, arguments do not
People change their minds when a story carries them somewhere, not when they lose a debate. Show the thing happening rather than explaining that it happens.
Green and Brock, The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives, 2000 ↗People need autonomy, mastery and connection
Motivation holds up when people have some control, are getting better at something, and are doing it with others. Automate all three away and the work stops being worth doing.
Deci and Ryan, Self-determination theory, 1985 onward ↗
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Still Human, Thanks for Asking.
The thesis, applied to one AI story a week. Five minutes.
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