In heavily populated urban areas, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will face a major challenge: pedestrians.

Most AVs are programmed to be very cautious, a trend that's likely to continue following the fatal crash of an Uber self-driving vehicle in Arizona, which struck a woman crossing the street. That's great; you don't want these cars careening through intersections. But you also don't want them at a complete standstill for long periods of time as pedestrians run against lights or wander into crosswalks while staring at their phones.

A couple of solutions to this conundrum have recently been proposed. One calls for AVs to use artificial intelligence (AI) to learn to be courteous but firm. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley devised a method to measure and quantify the "courtesy" mentality that most humans use in the give and take of everyday driving. They even developed algorithms that perform a cost/benefit analysis on the potential actions of AVs in various scenarios to make it easier for robo-cars to deal with irrational humans when they're driving or walking.

The second solution puts the onus on pedestrians to be reprogrammed to cross streets more consciously and responsibly when AVs are in the vicinity.

Modifying Pedestrian Behavior

In a recent Bloomberg story, Baidu VP and AI expert Andrew Ng suggested that pedestrians should modify their behavior to comply with self-driving cars. He added that people have always adapted to new technology and especially new modes of transportation.

"If you look at the emergence of railroads, for the most part people have learned not to stand in front of a train on the tracks," he said. He also pointed out that drivers have learned to recognize that school buses stop frequently and drop off children that may dash across the road in front of the bus, and hence drive more carefully.

Shuchisnigdha Deb, a researcher at Mississippi State University's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, told Bloomberg that "there should be proper education programs to make people familiar with these vehicles, the ways to interact with them and to use them."

Maya Pindeus, co-founder and CEO of the startup Humanising Autonomy, which is working on AI models of pedestrian behavior and gestures that self-driving cars can employ, added that education campaigns in Germany and Austria in the 1960s drastically reduced jaywalking deaths.

But others aren't buying Ng's tail-wagging-the-dog logic. Rodney Brooks, a renowned robotics researcher and an emeritus professor at MIT, wrote in a blog post that "the great promise of self-driving cars has been that they will eliminate traffic deaths. Now [Ng] is saying that they will eliminate traffic deaths as long as all humans are trained to change their behavior?"

Analyst Sam Abuelsamid put in more bluntly in a post for Forbes.com. "Frankly that's a totally unrealistic proposition," he wrote. "And any engineer working on automated driving that is expecting humans to adapt in order to make the technology safe is living in a dream world."

As Bloomberg pointed out, Ng's thinking is reminiscent of Steve Jobs' infamous defense of the iPhone 4's faulty antennae, saying "Just avoid holding it in that way." In this case, it would be "Don't walk this way." Good luck with that.

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