[notahacker]

> All of these agents follow a similar pattern of clothing (as I said, combination of similar garnments and colours) and behaviour (placement on the road, gesturing with authority, directly facing the car, etc.)

Repeating an assertion does not make it cease to be false. A very small handful of pictures you linked to shows a wide variety of coats, vests and shirts of many different colours, all of which heavily overlap with general garment types and colours used in everyday clothing which tend to indicate police only with small and greatly varying trim detailing (and sometimes hats). And is the clothing and trim designed to convey authority? isn't the sort of abstract pattern recognition computers do better than humans, or even at all well. Sure, you could certainly create specific police uniform training sets for every jurisdiction and possibly even cut down false positives in other jurisdictions by geofencing them (so you don't get people stopping in California for commuters wearing the distinctive er... blue shirts and black trousers of the Hong Kong police) but it's a non-trivial undertaking even if there are bigger problems for SDVs to tackle

More importantly, unlike humans evolved to have an intimate understanding of human mannerisms, machine learning has no concept of "gesturing with authority", beyond whether moving human shapes fit very specific patterns within its calibration parameters, and police officers often don't have scope to place themselves in a particular position in order to get the car to understand them.

> Google seems to understand these intentions well enough, and at a much higher level than mere word parsing.

The video shows examples of predicting possible directions of travel of moving road users based on maps and movements (i.e. its fundamental driving model) and a shot of it recognising two arm gestures in an idealised front on positions. Neither fall under the scope of being able to understand how the traffic policemen intends to clear the blocked intersection from his shouts and gesticulations at you and various other vehicles. Humans also don't need to be signalled to go again if the black-jacketed man they've stopped for was actually trying to hail the taxi behind them.