John Henry has been in the SF zeitgeist lately. He won the race against the steam drill, and then it didn’t matter. The drill replaced him and everyone like him. Physical strength used to define worth. Machines changed that. Strength didn’t disappear---it just stopped being economically meaningful. Now it’s something cultivated for health, for aesthetics, for personal satisfaction.

Intelligence is in the middle of the same transition. Working tirelessly on complex mental tasks requiring knowledge and experience---that’s what I was valued for, by myself and by every company I’ve worked at. Agents can do it now, cheaper and faster. What remains?

Maybe taste. Taste lives between people---understanding what’s in fashion, empathizing with your audience, yet creating something new and unexpected. That new and unexpected thing requires legibility: your audience has to get it, even if they couldn’t have predicted it. And taste is experiential, not optimal. We live finite lives, bounded by mortality, and taste is about filling that time with worth---what makes for a worthy life. That’s a philosophical question, not an engineering one.

Underneath taste is conviction. No one is born with taste---they simply have the conviction that through practice and patience, they will get there. Conviction is what you start with---persisting even when the world disagrees, often in opposition to current taste. It’s the thing you can work to develop, trusting that with conviction and time, you will find taste.

Einstein held the conviction that the speed of light was constant before anyone agreed. He sat with that conviction for years, developing his Gedankenexperimente---imagining himself riding a beam of light, watching a clock tower recede. And then he found the taste to make it legible: thought experiments so vivid that a century later, we still teach them to children.