Context: This series is a deep dive into the framework of The Curatorial Mind, based on my original essay. It explores the defining human skill of the AI era which is the practice of discernment and judgment in an age of digital abundance.
For decades, the primary constraint on progress was execution. If a project stalled, it was usually because of tangible scarcity: not enough budget, not enough time, or not enough people. That friction was often unwelcome, but it served a vital, hidden purpose. It forced us to prioritize. You could not do everything, so you had to do what mattered. The scarcity of effort acted as a natural filter for quality.
Today, those structural guards are falling away. AI has lowered the cost of execution to near zero. We can now produce drafts, variations, and plans faster than we can possibly evaluate them. But here is the catch. While systems accelerate action, they do not resolve intent. We are moving faster, but we are often moving toward what I call a diluted consequence.
When execution is cheap, we see a phenomenon called risk displacement. Instead of doing the hard work of deciding what is truly important, effort flows toward what is easiest to justify or least likely to be challenged. Responsibility diffuses into the speed of the workflow.
Because it is so easy to just try it, we stop asking if we should do it. We are essentially offloading the thinking to the doing.
This aligns with what AI researcher Nathan Lambert identifies as the central challenge in the modern job market. He notes that for established tech workers, the hiring process in AI can feel like a constant fog because the signals of true expertise are being drowned out by high-volume, AI-assisted output. The bottleneck is no longer about getting things done. The harder work lies in holding judgment long enough to shape the outcome.
If you are a leader, your job is no longer to manage the how. It is to protect the why. We must learn to re-introduce the good friction that forces us to stand behind a direction. Without that friction, we aren’t creating value; we are just contributing to the noise. As computer scientist Melanie Mitchell pointed out in the NY Times, we need informed-mindful humans to maximize the tool’s benefit rather than just letting the machine run on autopilot. Curation is the act of re-inserting that mindfulness into the machine’s velocity.
The Curator’s Prompt: Is your team moving fast because the path is clear, or because it is easier to keep moving than it is to stop and decide?