Fairly sure the point about not understanding how a car works when you turn the key is meant to represent increasingly complex systems - and for sure knowing “every single bit” is a tall order... but that expression (using a car engine as an example of an unknowably complex system) always struck me as odd: is the author unaware of how internal combustion works?

With the clear intelligence of the writing one has to guess that getting a cursory knowledge of how a gasoline motor, clutch, transmission and differential works would take far less time than this article took to write!

Maybe I’m being pedantic here but if you can make sense of Kafka - turning a car key shouldn’t be much of a mystery!