Intelligence Can Be Rented But Taste Must Be Earned
The Algorithmic Bridge Alberto Romero
An AI writer argues intelligence, ability, and talent are getting cheap thanks to AI, replaced by imagination, agency, and taste as the real success formula. When everyone can rent a genius for $20 a month, knowing what NOT to build becomes the actual skill.
Based on reporting by The Algorithmic Bridge, Alberto Romero — read the original for the full story.
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Alberto's pitch is a neat historical parallel: before AI, success ran on talent (your ceiling), intelligence (how fast you climbed toward it), and ability (the proof you'd arrived). Each was scarce, each fed the next, and that scarcity is exactly what made those traits valuable. He compares what's happening now to the Industrial Revolution's effect on physical strength — the steam engine didn't erase muscle, it just made raw strength economically irrelevant. AI, in his framing, does the same thing to cognition. It decouples cognitive labor from cognitive output.
The practical upshot is that the old scarce resources are now abundant. Intelligence gets rented by the token through a subscription. Ability gets delegated to an agent that executes the grunt work. And talent, once considered the uncopyable signature of an artist, turns out to be scrapeable from the open web in enormous quantities. So the ceiling, the climbing speed, and the proof-of-work all get commoditized at once, which is a strange position for anyone who built a career on being naturally gifted or fast.
What replaces the old trinity, according to Alberto, is imagination, agency, and taste. Imagination is the scope of what you're even willing to consider making. Agency is the antidote to the paralysis that kills half-finished AI side projects before they ship — because when tools remove the excuse of 'I don't know how,' the only excuse left is 'I didn't commit.' Taste is the restraint to know what not to create, which he treats as harder and rarer than knowing what to create.
He's writing this as a hook for a longer, paywalled piece — six years of watching the industry, he says, condensed into a formula readers can either reverse-engineer themselves over three years or read in five minutes. That commercial framing doesn't undercut the core observation, though: when output is cheap and fast, the bottleneck shifts from production to judgment. The article stops short of explaining how taste is actually built, which is the part everyone actually wants answered.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I like the John Henry comparison more than I like the tidy new trinity — taste has always mattered, AI just made its absence louder and its presence harder to fake with volume. My actual worry is that 'agency' as marketed here quietly rewards people who ship first and think later, which is how we got a web full of AI slop in the first place; restraint should come before agency, not after it.
Read more about this at: The Algorithmic Bridge
