Yeah it's been really odd to see the take that self-driving must require strong AI. It needs to be done carefully, but it's clearly a manageable engineering problem if you have good sensors.
If there's a person at an intersection directing traffic, it will be very hard to have the car itself communicate with them as easily as a human can. Edge cases like that is where AGI would be needed it seems.
So in this hypothetical is the person directing traffic completely oblivious to the existence of self driving cars? Pretty sure we can assume traffic cops in the future will be trained to deal with self driving cars and use only use gestures from a predefined list.
I would believe that people directing traffic usually use only a handful of signals, but it's certainly not a universal truth. This is one more case of the 80/20 problem that self driving tech keeps running into.
Sure it's probably feasible for cars to handle hand signals in the happy path, but anything outside of that will be disastrous. How will the car understand and communicate with a person who doesn't use the standard signals, aside from having some level of intelligence?
> People directing traffic use only a handful of signals.
Sometimes. Other times they confusingly gesticulate or just shout out things, or even give conflicting signals. Humans can interpret these without much effort but it's a hard AI problem.
