Eventually the cars will indeed be good about determining the intentions of other drivers, not by any sort of body language we might be able to instinctively in

Eventually the cars will indeed be good about determining the intentions of other drivers, not by any sort of body language we might be able to instinctively infer, but by learning what people often do and playing out those scenarios, ensuring it can handle either outcome. We aren't looking for 'perfect', even in the advent of human lives being at risk when going 80 mph on the freeway, it just needs to handle events with an outcome of an order of magnitude fewer incidents/deaths than the current paradigm of human drivers. > It can never scale to adapt to the unknown - even in principle. But the human will be able to fill in for the inference cars don't have. Even if we get to level 5 where there's no steering wheel, the human can still control the car's destination and what sort of operation modes the car is in; if there is some event and full-scale panic ensues, the AI driver isn't going to hit people in the street - either the human can instruct it to turn around, or they can get out of the car, since even now it's not really safe try to weave between humans in the street to reach your destination.