23rd January 2026
I was watching Steve Jobs’s speech on the other day, and it struck me that Apple’s success wasn’t built on technological innovation alone — though their tech is undeniably advanced. What set Apple apart was design. The taste, the aesthetic vision that Steve Jobs brought to every Apple device.
Jobs was famously difficult, perhaps even obsessively fastidious. His perfectionism was so intense that his own company grew frustrated enough to kick him out. Yet when he returned in the 1990s, the market vindicated him completely. His taste, his relentless pursuit of beauty — it was right all along.
Today, AI can do almost everything: generate images, build websites, design prototypes, and program entire systems. You name it, AI delivers. You may ask: What’s the point of human involvement when machines can handle it all?
Here’s the thing: AI is the car, but you’re still holding the steering wheel.
Your aesthetic judgment becomes the critical factor determining whether the output is beautiful or merely functional. If your taste is mediocre, AI will inevitably produce mediocre results. Garbage in, garbage out — but applied to sensibility rather than data.
There’s another crucial difference. Jobs didn’t just have good taste — he was opinionated about it. AI algorithms are designed to please the majority, to generate what most people would find acceptable, more precisely, the algorithms guess the most possible in-favored content. But transformative design always challenges conventional thinking. It disrupts. It makes bold choices that initially seem wrong.
That’s something AI cannot currently simulate: the courage to go against the grain when your instincts tell you the crowd is wrong.
So here’s my advice: cultivate your taste deliberately. Take art classes. Visit museums. Read poetry. Surround yourself with beautiful things — whether that’s Renaissance paintings or the gorgeous people in your life who inspire you(for example, like me).
In an AI-driven world, your aesthetic judgment isn’t becoming obsolete. It’s becoming your most valuable asset.