Automation, transparency, and bad behavior

From my email:

Dear Professor Cowen,
In places with weak institutions or corruption, might we want some workers to be so bad at their jobs that we can rest assured they are at least honest? Here’s my anecdote…
In New York I’m frustrated that uber drivers follow google maps so literally. They go crosstown on major boulevards like 23rd Street or 34th Street like Google Maps tells them to, when everyone knows a sidestreet would be quicker. When my driver’s app was glitching out, it took me ten minutes to persuade him that we were going in the wrong direction because he trusted his phone to the death. In NYC I long for old school cabbies who had the whole grid memorized and knew all the tricks.
But yesterday, I had to take an uber from a remote nontourist area of Sao Paulo to the airport, and I was thrilled that my uber driver was as clueless as I was. I don’t speak a word of Portuguese and I was bewildered by the city’s topography, and one hears about kidnappings and coerced tipping from unsavory drivers occasionally. But because this guy was hopeless without google maps, all I had to do to know I could trust him was to glance at his dashboard-mounted tablet and observe whether he was following the directions. That way, I knew very transparently that we were going to the airport not to his secret lair across town. If he was skilled enough to navigate without aid, his trustworthiness would have been, to my detriment, opaque.
Can this remotely be generalized? In situations where public trust is in question, it’s optimal for some workers to be bad at their jobs if it means that they have to observably rely on external guidance? For example, maybe it’s reassuring that in an airline cockpit, the first officer is relatively inexperienced, because our imagination of the captain’s additional “mentorship” role increases our confidence that things will be done by the book, like in a classroom, as opposed to expediently, like in a normal workplace?
As with my prior emails to you, I hope either that this has been interesting, or that stealing a minute of your attention is not as costly as I fear!
Sincerely,
Matt Grossman

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