The new illiteracy is not measured in letters. It is measured in questions.

Something curious has happened in recent years. For the first time in history, virtually anyone gained access to an intelligence capable of writing, analysing, calculating and reasoning in seconds. Access stopped being the differentiator. It is in everyone's hands, free or nearly so. And even so, the results people extract from that same intelligence are absurdly unequal. Two people facing the same tool, one draws something brilliant from it and the other draws a banality. The machine is identical. What changes is who is asking.

This is the outline of a new kind of illiteracy. Not that of someone who cannot read or write, which is still a real debt in this country, but that of someone who has a powerful intelligence at their disposal and does not know what to ask of it. It is the illiteracy of the question. The person looks at an almost unlimited capacity and can only formulate vague, generic, poorly framed demands, and receives back exactly what they put in, vague, generic, poorly framed answers. Then they conclude the tool is weak. The tool is not weak. The question was.

A confusion needs undoing here, and it matters a great deal. It became fashionable to treat this new illiteracy as a lack of prompt technique, as if there were a set of magic tricks, secret formulas and command words separating those who know from those who do not. Part of that is real and part is a passing illusion. The need to learn to speak in a specific way to the machine, memorising devices to extract a good answer from it, is a symptom of the technology's immaturity, not a competence to be celebrated. A good tool should not require the user to learn its language. It should understand the user's language. The day you need to become a prompt engineer to be served is the day the tool made you do its job.

There are, therefore, two literacies hidden inside the same subject, and confusing one with the other is the central error. The first is technical and superficial, mastering the tricks of a specific interface. That one will disappear, and it is good that it disappears, because every decent tool is moving towards understanding people's natural language, with no manual and no training. The second is human and deep, knowing how to formulate the right question about the right problem. That one does not disappear with any technical advance. On the contrary, the more capable the machine becomes, the more value migrates to the quality of the question put to it. Prompt technique is a skill the evolution of technology will retire. Knowing how to ask is a skill the same evolution will make ever more valuable.

Knowing how to ask is harder and rarer than it seems, because it is not about the tool, it is about thinking. A good question carries an understanding of the problem inside it. It frames what matters, excludes the noise, brings the necessary context and makes clear which decision is at stake. Asking a good question is already having done half the reasoning. That is why the person who asks well is not the one who memorised commands, it is the one who understands their own business deeply enough to know what, exactly, they need to know. The machine answers at the level of the asker's clarity. Clarity is not downloaded from a tutorial. It is built by thinking.

A concrete scenario, because in the corporate environment this difference is worth money. Two executives have access to the same intelligence connected to the company's data. The first asks how sales are going. He receives a correct, generic overview, useless for deciding anything. The second asks in which region margin fell despite volume rising last quarter, and what in the data suggests why. He receives a path to a decision. The tool was the same, the data was the same, the response time was the same. The distance between a banality and a decision worth millions lay entirely in the question. The first executive is, in that precise sense, the new illiterate. Not because he cannot use the machine, but because he cannot interrogate his own operation.

There is a strategic consequence companies have not yet digested. If the answer became a commodity, available to any competitor with access to the same technology, then competitive advantage shifts entirely to the quality of the questions an organisation is able to ask. Companies that cultivate people who ask well, and that give those people an intelligence connected to the real data of the business, will decide better and faster than the rest. Not because they have a superior AI, but because they have a superior culture of asking. The advantage is no longer in having the answer. It is in knowing what to ask.

This is where Mars sees things in a particular way. Signals was built so that a person speaks in natural language, without needing to learn the machine's language, precisely so that the only literacy left is the one that truly matters, knowing what to ask about your own operation. Your questions, your answers, your decisions. The order of that sentence is not accidental. Everything starts with the question. The platform exists to remove all friction between the good question and the good decision, without forcing anyone to become a technician to be served. What it does not do, and no honest tool promises to do, is think the question for you. That remains human. And it is, increasingly, what separates those who decide from those who merely consult.

The new illiteracy, in the end, is not about technology. It is about clarity of thought in an era where the answer became easy and the good question became rare. The good news is that this is a literacy that can be learned, practised and cultivated, in people and in teams. From complexity to clarity begins long before the answer. It begins with the courage and the preparation to ask the right question.