I prefer Dan Shapiro's 5 level analogy (based on car autonomy levels) because it makes for a cleaner maturity model when discussing with people who are not as deeply immersed in the current state of the art. But there are some good overall insights in this piece, and there are enough breadcrumbs to lead to further exploration, which I appreciate. I think levels 3 and 4 should be collapsed, and the real magic starts to happen after combining 5 and 6; maybe they should be merged as well.
Car levels autonomy is fake. Everything including Level 3 is not a real autonomy it is hard rules + some reaction to the world, and everything above 3 is autonomy with just s slightly human security guardrails to attempt the real autonomy.
At this moment where we have human who just sit there before verify enough 9 after comas of error rates, the entire level conversation is dead. It's almost a binary state. Autonomous or not.
Similar happened with software levels. Even Level 2 was sci-fi 2 years ago, 1 year away from now anything bellow level 5 will be a joke except very regulated or billion users systems scale software.
Agreed; here's the link for anyone looking for it:
https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2026/01/the-five-levels-from...