I majored in communication studies in college. It was in one of those classes that I first encountered the concept of "curation." That was the era of Web 2.0, when blogs and YouTube were just emerging and everyone was suddenly pouring UGC onto the internet. Now, more than a decade later, we're talking about an age of curation again.

Thanks to AI, content is pouring out at a pace incomparable to the early web. AI is no longer just generating content; it's steadily taking over the execution work humans used to do. And the easier it becomes to make and execute things, the more it matters to judge what's actually worth making, and to choose one result out of countless possibilities.

That process of choosing and judging is exactly what curation is about. Curation isn't simple collecting. It's deciding what to keep and what to discard by your own standard, designing the relationships between the things you've chosen, and explaining why they matter. As those choices accumulate, they become a person's distinct eye: their taste, their point of view.

Of course, curation and a good eye were always important. What's genuinely new in the age of AI isn't that importance itself, but the scope in which curation operates.

In the Web 2.0 era, curation was mostly about deciding what to look at and what to connect, out of an overflow of existing content. In the age of AI, curation is expanding into deciding which problems to take on, what to make and execute, and which of countless outputs to actually put into the world. Curation is no longer confined to the final step of organizing something already made. Now it's involved from the very beginning, choosing the problem, all the way to the end, evaluating and releasing the result.

This shift is already showing up, in small ways, in hiring. As agentic coding spreads, the ability to write code alone no longer fully explains a developer's capability. Companies now want to understand which problems a developer chose to work on, what process they went through to solve them, and what standards guided their judgment along the way.

The same is true for designers. What they consider beautiful, how finely they break a problem down before thinking it through, and why they made a particular choice among countless possibilities: all of this is becoming more important. The faster AI can produce a plausible-looking result, the harder it becomes to judge someone's actual capability from the result alone. The ability to explain not just what you made, but what you discarded and why you kept what you kept, is becoming just as important as the output itself.

Think about a museum or a gallery. Each one collects the works it considers important, based on the values and themes it stands for. It then designs the relationships and sequence of those works, shaping an exhibition around the message it wants to convey. As these choices accumulate over time, people naturally come to associate a certain museum with a certain subject. Museums didn't just collect works; they repeatedly chose what to preserve and what to exhibit. And that accumulated pattern of choices eventually became the museum's point of view, its identity.

Going forward, individuals need to become their own small museum. We need to collect and connect the things we judge to be important, and record the reasons behind those choices. But exhibiting only the finished result isn't enough anymore. We also need to show what we saw as the problem, what we chose and what we discarded, what standards we used to revise things, and when we decided something was finished. Choices accumulated over a long time like that go beyond mere taste; they become a person's own point of view. And that point of view becomes a form of competitive advantage that can't easily be copied.

Your own museum is, in a sense, also a portfolio. Perspective and taste are hard to prove through a resume or a self-introduction alone. When you consistently show the world what you've chosen and how you've connected it, people come to understand who you are through that accumulation. And that understanding can naturally lead to new relationships and new opportunities.

Going forward, people won't trust someone based on their words or their title alone. They'll look at what that person has collected and discarded over a long period of time, and by what standards they made those choices. In the end, we're heading toward an era where we discover and trust each other's perspective and taste through the small museums each of us has built.