Confident Mediocrity: On AI, taste, and what happens when the machine works faster than your judgment.
One of the more useful Substacks I read is from Greg Shove and Taylor Malmsheimer from SectionAI, the online school that has shaped so much of my way of thinking about AI, not as it’s applied to creativity, but how it’s applied to business. I completed my Mini-MBA in AI for Business with Section a while ago. In the most recent newsletter, Greg and Taylor point to two observations. They weren’t connected, rather part of a long list of observations.
I think they should be.
The first: the work ratio has flipped. For most of modern professional history, work looked roughly like this — 10% deciding what to make, 80% making it, 10% checking whether it was any good. That middle 80% was the job. That’s where the hours went, where the craft lived, where you proved your value by volume of output.
Now it’s closer to 40/20/40.
Your numbers may look different right now. But start asking your team how they’re actually allocating their time on any given project, and watch what you find. The shift is already happening underneath the official version of how work gets done.
The making — the part machines have swallowed — is down to 20%. The bookends have doubled. Human time is now concentrated at the front, where you decide what matters and instruct the machine on how to pursue it, and at the back, where you judge what came out and refine it with something the machine doesn’t have.
We’ll get to what that something is.
The second observation: you feel like a bottleneck, yet more valuable at the same time. Machines work faster than you. You are simultaneously the most important part of the process and the thing slowing it down. That tension is uncomfortable.
It’s also correct.
Most people I talk to are experiencing this and don’t have language for it. They know something has shifted. They feel both more necessary and more exposed. They’re producing more, faster, and somehow feel less confident about what they’re contributing.
That’s not an accident. That’s the ratio doing its work on you.
Taste Is the Job Now
Here’s what’s actually happening at both bookends.
