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.
Over the last year, AI-enabled tools have radically accelerated the pace of work. Tasks that once took days now compressinto seconds. Drafts appear instantly. Cycles shorten. We expected this speed to make work lighter, but for many of us, theopposite has happened. Work feels faster, yet somehow heavier. This is the central paradox of the automation age: as the cost of production drops to zero, the weight of responsibility for the output increases.
This series grows out of an essay I wrote called The Curatorial Mind. That piece began as a reflection on music, specifically on how creative work actually happens when generation becomes effortless but judgment remains difficult. As Keith Richards famously said, “I don’t write songs. I find them. They are out there. I just catch them before they float away.” What I discovered in the studio applies to every boardroom: as our tools get better at producing, our primary human value shifts from making to choosing.
In the world of AI, we are seeing what I call a Move 37 moment. This refers to the famous AlphaGo match where themachine made a move so alien and brilliant that it shocked the world’s best players. The machine was playing a game humans didn’t recognize. The human response to that is Move 78, the countermove that provides the meaning, the soul, and the direction. AI is the pattern machine, but the human is the one who recognizes which pattern matters.
As the NY Times panel on AI recently highlighted, we are at a crossroads where technology could either empower us or turn our industries into slop factories. Historian Yuval Noah Harari noted in that discussion that this is the first time in historywhere we have no idea what the world will look like in ten years. In that vacuum of certainty, your head (intellectual skills), your heart (social skills), and your hands (motor skills) must work together.
This series is not about AI as technology. AI is the context, not the subject. The subject is human judgment under pressure. Over the next 13 posts, we will explore why the bottleneck in work is moving upstream, why speed can quietly dissolve ownership, and why curation is no longer a luxury. It is the central skill for staying relevant in an automated world. The invitation is simple: Do not fear the abundance. Do not compete with the machine on speed. Instead, learn to select, shape, and discern. In a world of infinite output, the real scarcity is the person who knows what is finally right.
The Curator’s Prompt: Think about your last work week. How much time did you spend generating versus deciding? Which felt more valuable to your organization?