As someone who works in AI, I'm constantly thinking about what the impact of this technology will be long term. Every technological innovation comes with a set of winners and losers. People who stand to gain immensely, and people who stand to lose a lot. AI is no different in that regard. So, to that end, it's useful to think about what kinds of qualities will be useful in a world of AI natives.
In tech, it seems like the most talked-about quality is taste. Sarah Guo has a great article describing what makes taste an important differentiator for startups. For her, taste is a hard-earned trait that arises from difficult decision-making.
"The discipline required is brutal. It means killing features on principle while competitors ship everything. It means perfecting core flows while the market screams for more scope. It means watching opportunities pass because taking them would break the product's coherence.When you know exactly what you're building and why, you waste less time on revisions, pivots, and apology releases. Clear taste acts as a decision-making accelerant. Every choice becomes obvious when filtered through a coherent point of view.
Michael Truell, cofounder of Cursor, says that taste is "having the right idea for what should be built". For him, taste in software is often conflated with the aesthetics and design of how the software looks, but often neglected is how it works. He describes the role of a software engineer transitioning from a very careful instructor of machines to a logic designer. (which sounds way cooler imo)
But while taste dominates the conversation about thriving in an AI world, I think we're missing something more fundamental. Taste, as Guo and Truell describe it, is about making the right decisions within a known problem space. But how do you know what problems are worth solving in the first place?
To do that, you need to be curious.
Curiosity and taste are deeply complementary traits. Curiosity is fundamentally about expanding your set of known options. Its discovery for interest's sake. Taste is about compression. It's about closing in on the options that feel most useful within some set of constraints. While taste helps you execute brilliantly on known opportunities, curiosity helps you discover the opportunities that others haven't even noticed yet. In a world where AI can increasingly handle the 'how' of building solutions, the real competitive advantage lies in asking better questions.
Asking good questions is hard. Really hard. When I say good, I mean that the question forces your audience to pause and think before responding. It's hard because that requires you to assess your audience's set of experiences and knowledge to figure out exactly where the gaps in their thinking live. When you ask a good question, you're tapping a part of someone's brain that's relatively unexplored.
It's an entirely different intellectual muscle from cultivating taste, but I'd argue it's the most important. When I think about progress at the individual or even community level, it almost always starts with a good question.
"What would happen if I organized an event to bring people together?".
"What would it take for me to start working out consistently?"
"What makes people do the things that they do?"
Questions that lead to answers, which lead to questions, which hopefully lead to more answers.
Children understand this way better than adults. They ask questions at an astonishing rate. Their curiosity is insatiable. Partly because they don't know too much. But what is it about growing up that makes us ask far fewer questions? Is it because we think we have it all figured out? Almost no one I talk to would make such a bold claim. Is it because we're afraid to? Fear of looking stupid makes sense, but that alone doesn't seem to provide a good answer.
Generally, I think curiosity is a function of what one believes is possible. As we get older, it feels like the set of options available to us is getting smaller each day. My prospects of being an NBA player (however small they were to begin with) feel infinitely lower today than they did when I was in middle school. As a result, I stopped dreaming about certain things or trying to find the wonder in them.
Another reason curiosity trends downward is that a prerequisite to asking good questions, is thinking harder. When you know nothing about a topic, asking surface-level questions is easy. When you know a lot, asking tough questions is hard. Thinking hard is really important. The effort we put into thinking hard pays dividends in compounding ways. If nothing good comes easy, then certainly nothing interesting comes without deep thought. In the short era form of media today, thinking hard can seem like too much work, but it can really make all the difference.
There's this quote that's stuck with me about knowing the difference between the impossible, and the highly improbable. The former is a waste of time, and the latter is where your life's work lives. The only way to distinguish the two is to dig deep enough by asking useful questions. Ask about the path, even if the destination doesn't exist and vice versa.
I learned how to do that in software first. Building software taught me that simple and easy are not the same thing. Simple things are easy to understand. Easy things are low effort to do. That which is easy to do is simple to understand, but that which is simple to understand is not necessarily easy to do. It's one of those things that once you see, you can't unsee it anywhere else.
So in short, ask questions about everything. There's a school of thought that focuses on asking questions that are "productive" and distinguishes those from other questions. Don't be in that game. Questions that get at your interests are signal enough.
If you know me personally, you know that I run a segment on Instagram called the Question of the Day, and much of what I do there is inspired by this line of reasoning.
Once you realize that simple-seeming things are not so simple, the world becomes infinitely more interesting.