Unconscious competence

There’s a point in every driver’s life when you stop thinking about driving. You just do it. You change lanes, check the mirrors, tap the brakes, and turn like it’s part of the routine. It’s like breathing.

That’s what some people call unconscious competence. You’ve done something so many times that it becomes automatic. You don’t need to analyze it anymore. You just move.

When I first learned to drive, my teacher was not a professional instructor. It was my bandmate Dondon, our guitarist who firmly believed he played like Paul Gilbert. Back then, we had a small punk band and an even smaller budget, so my classroom was a Toyota Corolla XL from the early ’90s. It was a car you had to wrestle with. No power windows and definitely no power steering. It was pure pawis steering.

The windows rolled down with a crank, and the clutch, though smooth, felt like a leg workout. But that base-model Corolla was a legend. It was the perfect car for learning because it gave you no shortcuts. You learned to feel every bite of the clutch, until driving became muscle memory.

Years later, I found myself on the track taking a driving crash course from veteran racers George and Louie Ramirez. They focused on precision, balance, rhythm and safety.

What I learned from Dondon in that old Corolla suddenly made sense. I learned to feel when the clutch bit and the car began to move. The same habits helped me stay calm on the circuit.

That’s how learning seems to work. Learning builds up slowly until effort turns into instinct. The same thing happens when we take on something new, from engineering to journalism. At first, everything feels awkward. Then slowly, it starts to make sense.

That thought reminded me of something Demis Hassabis said in an interview. He’s the head of Google DeepMind and a Nobel Prize winner. He once said the greatest skill to learn in the age of AI is how to learn.

That’s exactly what driving is. It’s continuous learning until instinct takes over. Machines keep getting smarter, but those who keep learning, unlearning, improving, and trying again will always stay ahead.

AI learns that way, too. It makes a move, gets feedback, then tries again. Humans do the same thing but with feelings and sometimes frustrations. The way we learn is not far from reinforcement learning. We try and adjust until it finally feels right.

When you get behind the wheel again, think about how far you have come since your first driving lesson. You actually learned how to learn. You learned how to adapt and improve, without even realizing it.

Maybe that’s the real lesson from the road. Mastery comes when learning becomes instinct, when we learn by feel. Machines can simulate that process, but they will not experience it — at least for now.

So maybe unconscious competence is just our way of saying we have mastered the art of learning by feel. And until AI learns that, it’s not driving stick anytime soon.