Re: Autonomous cars and other road users
Eye contact is a plus, though it's not strictly necessary — it doesn't work at night, for example. But on the other hand, we tend to concentrate on what humans do that self-driving cars cannot replicate, like eye contact, and we fail to imagine things that self-driving cars could do that humans couldn't because of their own limitations. For instance, self-driving cars could have a blinking red light on the front of the car meaning "I'm not moving, you go ahead", or multiple other indicators which would be too bothersome for a human to coordinate and trivial to implement on a self-driving car.
Now that I think of it, when eye contact is not possible at night, humans sometimes stop and flash the headlights to indicate "go ahead". I wonder if this has been implemented on self-driving cars.