Doors open and the machine swallows them whole. A third entity emerges from their merger. The Carman is born. I try not to look at you. The grotesque form of man merged with machine. Flailing about in that nightmarish world. Their soul is lost. Their eyes droop and lethargy engulfs their mind. They are its slave now.

There is an optimal use for each machine that is rarely reached and never maintained for long. The average person isn’t very capable to begin with and I estimate that their IQ drops by at least 10 points upon merging with a car. I’ve also found that if I do not make eye contact with the other driver I can manipulate them into operating as if I wasn’t there which is optimal because it allows me to better predict their behavior and maneuver around them as if they were some mundane, inanimate object in the environment. I do not believe humans drive cars because it would be too harsh a reality to accept. Instead I believe the average person is a machine that loses their ability to fully operate when integrating with a car and thus becomes this third abstract entity. An entity that is sub-optimal as a human and sub-optimal as a car. Thus the Carman.

Obviously, I’m being overly dramatic and harsh, but basically what I’m saying is: cars are not the perfect user experience. They’re not perfectly designed for human interaction and each person, depending on their own brain, may find themselves more or less capable of interacting with it successfully. Thus there is an immediate and overall loss of optimization when a human merges with a car. Humans are optimal as humans and cars optimal as cars, but the carman suffers from a loss of fidelity in bridging those communications. The translations aren’t perfect and this applies to all complex systems we interact with: computers, the Internet, your microwave, TV. We all fail to fully communicate with them as originally intended, but there are humans that know this and they compensate by understanding these machines at a deeper level to gain a higher level of proficiency. Professional drivers, programmers, technicians, engineers. The first step is to realize this intersection of man and machine exists and that an abstraction emerges that is neither you nor the system you’re interacting with. It’s something else. Something a little alien that needs to be understood separately from the two objects in question. Once you can do that, you can start to consciously correct errors that have eluded you your entire life rather than stumbling upon them accidentally.