The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory
I’ve now seen dozens of companies struggling to put AI to work writing code, and each one has moved through five clear tiers of automation. That felt familiar, and I realized that the federal government had been there first – but for cars. In 2013, the NHTSA created the five levels of driving automation1. This was helpful, because while the highest level at the time was only level 22, it let everyone have a common language for both where things were, and where things were going.