Take your pick: self-driving or driving by self?

Last week, I finished reading Walter Isaacson’s 650 pager biography of Elon Musk. Whew! I felt like I had just completed a marathon. Post the read, one of the things that stayed with me is Musk’s obsession with a self-driving car that uses camera-vision (basically akin to the human eye) rather than using radar that most other automotive companies use. Musk’s logic- if an average human being can drive a car in bad weather or under night conditions, a self-driving car needs to be able to do the same without any radar technology, and by relying on just camera vision.

And then, just last week, I happened to speak to an old friend who absolutely is terrified of driving a car himself. He tried once to learn to drive and actually failed his driving test. He feels that driving is too complicated and he would rather be driven than take the wheel. I am sure he would be one of first people to buy a Tesla whenever Tesla launches in India.

These two unrelated incidences got me thinking- how does using a self-driving car compare to driving the car yourself? Conceptually, to me, both are more or less the same. Surprised? Let me explain with the help of four stages of the Dunning-Kruger framework.

The original Dunning-Kruger effect simply states that people with limited competence tend to over-estimate their ability. Basically, the less you know, the more you think you know. The Dunning-Kruger effect subsequently led to the four stages of a more general framework, as below:  

Now, let’s map self-driving cars (i.e. the LLM that drives the car) and a human learning to drive, against this framework, as below:

As you can see, self-driving cars or humans learning to drive a car follow the same process.

Now the question- What’s your pick: self-driving cars or driving by self? Let me give you my take. Learning anything new is always painful. But if you enjoy the learning journey as well as the journey after you have mastered it, you would prefer the ‘driving by self’ option, like me. But, if you just want to get from point A to point B with maximum convenience and least pain, you would prefer the self-driving car option.

Something to think about..