Why Did the Human Cross the Road? To Confuse the Self-Driving Car

Driving in a busy city, you have to get good at scrutinizing the body language of pedestrians. Your foot hovers somewhere between the gas and the brake, waiting for your brain to triangulate their intent: Is that one trying to cross the street, or just waiting for the bus? Still, a whole lot of the time you hit the brakes for nothing, ending up in a kind of dance with the pedestrian (you go, no you go, no YOU go). If you think that's frustrating, then you've never been a self-driving car. As human drivers slowly go extinct (and human pedestrians don't), autonomous vehicles will have to get better at decoding those unspoken intersection interactions.