When you’re in an unfamiliar area, driving with directions guides you to your destination. At each lane change, turn, and exit it lets you know your next move and uses context like your precise location, traffic conditions, and more to get you there safely and efficiently while you manually operate a vehicle.

Working alongside AI should be like driving with directions. If you’re in an unfamiliar area, it nudges you in the right direction by predicting the next sequence for whatever you’re doing, whether coding, designing, or writing. And you can choose whether to ignore the directions or not because you’re in control.

And then there’s self-driving cars. You give it a destination and it just figures it out. It navigates real world conditions to get you there safely and efficiently while it operates the vehicle autonomously.

Consider self-driving software. This is software that autonomously operates itself given a high-level directive. It attempts to figure it out using some context to accomplish a task.

Whether autonomous cars or software, you need to grow comfortable with it and gain trust. In my personal experience with self-driving cars, it was only a matter of minutes into my very first ride that my brain rewired itself to normalize a new reality.

2025 will start surfacing the shift to self-driving software. I believe that growing comfortable and trusting this may take some time. It will feel very different, and it will be up to the right interfaces that strike the perfect balance of familiarity, dependability, and predictability to help us normalize this new reality.