Reading, writing, arithmetic: the crisis coverage almost never leaves the three Rs. But the list is a reduction. The old core of schooling put logic at its gateway, and the slogan dropped it. Reasoning has no score, so it can have no crisis, so it is almost never deliberately taught. And AI just made the mechanical layer of the other three nearly free.
Juniors learned the trade by doing the grunt work next to seniors. AI is cutting the grunt work and remote work is cutting the proximity, so the apprenticeship that quietly made partners is breaking, and few firms I know of are designing a replacement. Who becomes the next partner?
The Wall Street Journal spent fourteen years testing stock pickers against darts, and more than two decades of fund scoreboards show nearly nine in ten large-cap funds trailing the plain index over fifteen years. The same belief is reassembling around AI: predictive language models read as insight engines, and for most uses there is no scoreboard. Same error, new tape. Here is the test that would settle it, and the reason its result will not.
A genre of social media post promises the prompts that replace McKinsey: the SWOT, the market analysis, the deck. Nine prompts, sometimes ten. Every list I have seen omits the same one, the prompt that checks whether the AI got any of it wrong. That omission is the tell. The deck was never the product. The checking was, and it still has to be human.