The trickiest challenge for self-driving cars -- which may still
take decades to hone -- is getting computers to process
unpredictable situations as quickly and effectively as a human
being can. At the MIT conference, Leonard showed some dashcam video
footage of his own car navigating Boston traffic, which highlighted
powers of the human brain computers can’t yet match. In one scene,
the car approaches an intersection where the traffic light is red
but a police officer is waving cars through. A couple blocks later,
the opposite occurs: the traffic light is green but a police
officer is signaling cars to stop.
Most people know intuitively that the police officer trumps the
traffic light, and they’ll do what the cop directs them to do.
That’s very hard to build into a computer algorithm, which would
basically follow the general rule of doing what the traffic light
says. Police presence can be programmed into the algo, but it’s
still hard for software to tell if somebody waving their arms at an
intersection is a law-enforcement officer or a stupid idiot.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/google-tesla-self-driving-cars-human-drivers-171042031.html
