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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"simply looking at the ball. This, however, was not the case: Although they looked at the ball once it had been thrown in the air, they spent a lot of time looking at my face, particularly before the ball reached the top of the screen."

I wonder if self driving car tech thinks about this kind of thing. How often, for example, at intersections, we look at the faces of other drivers and pedestrians for context.

It's interesting to me both as data for the self driving car, and the obvious lack of data for human drivers looking at a self driving car.

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It is my experience that I often know what a driver before me is going to do even before they have started to do so. Probably because I pick up very small changes in their behavior, as like reducing their speed a little, even before I have become conscious of them doing so. In theory you could train a neural network to do the same, but it would probably require a neural network much larger than the 'electronic' ones that are being used. I guess our 'biological' neural networks are still much more efficient, energy and size wise, than there 'electronic' versions.

I'm not saying it is, and I'm not saying it isn't, and I definitely have felt the same thing, but it seems to me that the sensation you're calling out is very susceptible to both confirmation bias and post-hoc reasoning. For example, I'm sure your brain fires harder when your "expectation" is met than when it isn't or in all those situations where you just don't make a distinct prediction.

My feeling is that AI would be able to do this much better and more consistently than humans in a relatively short amount of training time.

Provided that for instance all Teslas can learn from all other Teslas' experience.

It is one safety tip you learn when riding motorcycles, however in the realm of self driving cars not only would the face be an interesting item to track but what about hand motions like when people wave you through out of turn?

People who bend the rules like that are a problem to be fixed, not one to be accomodated. I would train the self driving cars to wait until the appropriate conditions are met, and if that means until that person stops waving and continues appropriately, all the better. Road rules are as much about predictability as they are about safety. As long as you can predict another road user will behave a certain way, you can ensure that you can navigate a situation safely without further communication. The moment they start to bend the rules, they introduce uncertainty into the system, which increases the need for communication and the likelihood of mistakes.

This is a fairly fundamental difference between how machines operate and how people operate. People can evaluate and communicate, and it is very inhuman to sit at the intersection with your blinker on while the person who has right of way is frantically waving you on because of some reason. And while you would fail your driving test if you did accept permission to proceed, the reality is it is known and accepted and expected that people will adjust in more normal situations. To the point I recall being explicitly warned of this exact situation before taking my test. And I recall that because it actually happened during my exam, and I was amused at the uncomfortable feelings as I kept my hands on the wheel and ignored the adult giving the young novice permission to go while they rummaged in their glove compartment.

I do agree that self driving cars should wait until appropriate conditions are met, because they can't make rational decisions. I think while there are mixed self-driving and human driven cars on the road, there will need to be some sort of visible differentiation for cars running in autonomous mode, because they are never going to react the same as humans unless we teach them to react as badly as humans ;)

When teaching my kids to cross the road, I tell them to look for oncoming cars and to make sure the driver can see them (by checking where they're looking) instead of trying to judge if there's sufficient space to cross safely.

What I find interesting is that this varies by country. In some countries, making eye contact with a driver before crossing in front of their car is the right thing to do. In other countries, the best way to cross a road is to pretend that you haven’t seen the on-coming traffic, and to step into traffic without looking at the drivers...

Totally agree. You have to heed your location.

Here in SF, if you look the driver in the eye, you have yielded the right of way to him. Even though state law gives the pedestrian the right of way when they are in a crosswalk.

Speaking as someone who lives in SF, I have never experienced what you describe.

I certainly had plenty of drivers casually and negligently drive through crosswalks occupied by pedestrians (done it myself too when I shouldn’t have)

Or did you mean the “eye contact yields right of way to the vehicle” bit?

I mean the "eye contact yields right of way to the vehicle". In my experience as a pedestrian any time I make eye contact with a vehicle they wave me through, even if my intention was to let them go first.

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