Taste as a commitment

Taste here does not mean predicting what people will like; recommender systems already do that better than any critic. It means the judgment a person puts a name to: this is good, I stand by it, and you can hold my future judgments to it. Hume's qualified critic earns standing through practice, comparison and freedom from prejudice, and can lose it; an editor, a curator or a reviewer is trusted because their taste has a history and a cost. Generated rankings have neither, which is why the human capacity remains held even as its inputs are automated.