Something very, very important that this article doesn’t mention is that humans often crash into large, immobile objects where they aren’t supposed to be all the time. It is extremely, extremely common. This is not (just) a computer issue. In fact, I suspect autonomous vehicles will eventually be better at avoiding these sorts of accidents than humans.

One I remember is that a tractor trailer jackknifed on a highway. It was clear weather. Nevertheless, 20 cars smashed right into the trailer without braking. They simply did not see it because their minds were not expecting it to be there.

Most people have probably heard of the invisible gorilla experiment. The tractor-trailer crash and resulting pile-up is an example of that sort of inattentional blindness. Like the autonomous vehicles, the humans were on the lookout for other moving vehicles. The saw what they expected to see, and were looking for, and all else was not visible.

In this instance, we — as we should — are holding our robots to higher standards than we hold ourselves.