Need to Understand Human Behavior Better for Car Autonomy

The word 'psychoanalyze' may be overstating it, but we need to know humans likely behavior in specific and often complex context.    As we now drive we do that all the time.   Can autonomous vehicles do it as well?   With the goal being progress and safety?

MIT is teaching self-driving cars how to psychoanalyze humans on the road    By Luke Dormeh  in Digitaltrends

In March 2004, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) organized a special Grand Challenge event to test out the promise — or lack thereof — of current-generation self-driving cars. Entrants from the world’s top A.I. labs competed for a $1 million prize; their custom-built vehicles trying their best to autonomously navigate a 142-mile route through California’s Mojave Desert. It didn’t go well. The “winning” team managed to travel just 7.4 miles in several hours before shuddering to a halt. And catching fire.

A decade-and-a-half, a whole lot has changed. Self-driving cars have successfully driven hundreds of thousands of miles on actual roads. It’s non-controversial to say that humans will almost certainly be safer in a car driven by a robot than they are in one driven by a human. However, while there will eventually be a tipping point when every car on the road is autonomous, there’s also going to be a messy intermediary phase when self-driving cars will have to share the road with human-driven cars. You know who the problem parties are likely to be in this scenario? That’s right: the fleshy, unpredictable, sometimes-cautious, sometimes-prone-to-road-rage humans. .... "