Ask any expert how they got good and you’ll hear a version of the same story: years of doing the boring parts, badly, while someone more experienced fixed them. Nobody has ever found a shortcut. Now notice that the boring parts are exactly what we just automated.

Expertise looks like knowledge from outside and it isn’t, quite. It’s calibrated judgment, and judgment is built out of a large number of encounters with the specific ways things go wrong. The senior lawyer who glances at a clause and says no is not recalling a rule. She’s recognizing a pattern she met eleven times as a junior, three of which went badly. The engineer who says that’ll break in production has watched it break in production. You cannot install that. It accumulates, slowly, through contact with real cases, and most of those cases have to be low stakes ones you’re allowed to get wrong.

That’s what the junior years are for. They look like cheap labor and they’re actually a training program disguised as cheap labor, subsidized by the firm because the firm needs seniors in ten years and there is no other way to manufacture one. The first draft nobody sends. The review of documents that turn out to matter twice a year. The model you build that your manager rebuilds. Dull, necessary, and the only known method.

So look at what these systems are good at right now. Not the hard judgment. The first draft. The document review. The starter model. The clean, well-specified, high-volume, low-stakes work with plenty of examples, which is the same list, item for item, as the junior year. This isn’t a coincidence. Those tasks were given to juniors precisely because they were the most structured and forgiving parts of the work, and structured and forgiving is exactly what a machine learns first.

Now put yourself in the chair of the person deciding next year’s hiring. A junior costs real money, produces little for eighteen months, needs a senior’s time to supervise, and might leave the moment they’re useful. The alternative is cheaper, faster, available immediately, and doesn’t need mentoring. There is no version of that comparison where hiring the junior wins on this year’s numbers. The manager isn’t being callous. They’re being correct, within the boundary of what they’re accountable for.

And that’s the trap, because the thing being consumed isn’t owned by anyone. A firm that skips its juniors gets a better margin now and a shortage in a decade, by which time it can hire experienced people from somewhere else. Every firm reasons the same way, and there is no somewhere else, because somewhere else was doing the same arithmetic. The supply of expertise is a commons that every individual actor is rewarded for not maintaining, and there’s no committee anywhere whose job is to notice.

What worries me most isn’t the unemployment. It’s the supervision. This whole series has leaned on the idea that humans stay in the loop and check the machine’s work, and checking requires someone who could have done the work. A reviewer without judgment isn’t a check, they’re a signature. So if the machines take the rungs, the next generation arrives at the review chair having never developed the thing the chair exists to apply, and the oversight that everyone’s safety plan depends on becomes ceremonial about fifteen years before anyone notices it happened.

The fair counterargument is that training changes when tools change, and it always has. Nobody learns navigation the way a ship’s officer did in 1850, and modern officers are not worse at their jobs. New tools bring new apprenticeships: maybe the junior year becomes about directing systems, catching their failure modes, and building judgment at a higher level of abstraction. That’s plausible. It’s also currently a hope with no curriculum attached, and I notice that the firms most enthusiastic about it are not the ones opening training programs.

There’s a second and more uncomfortable possibility, which is that judgment at the higher level of abstraction can’t be built without the lower one, the way you can’t develop taste in architecture without ever having stood in a building. If that’s true, the new apprenticeship doesn’t exist and can’t be designed, and we find out in about a decade.

Tonight’s exercise. Think back to how you actually became competent at whatever you do. Find the specific dull task you did hundreds of times, the one that felt like a waste at the time, and be honest about what it taught you that nothing else did. Then ask whether a person joining your field this year will get to do it. If the answer is no, the follow-up question is the whole post: who is going to check the machine’s work in 2040, and where exactly are they learning how.