Can neuroscience teach self-driving cars to anticipate human behaviour?

If driverless cars can't be safely programmed to mimic risk-taking human drivers, perhaps they can be taught to better understand the way humans act

Robot cars make for annoying drivers.

Relative to human motorists, the driverless vehicles now undergoing testing on public roads are overly cautious, maddeningly slow, and prone to abrupt halts or bizarre paralysis caused by bikers, joggers, crosswalks or anything else that doesn’t fit within the neat confines of binary robot brains. Self-driving companies are well aware of the problem, but there’s not much they can do at this point. Tweaking the algorithms to produce a smoother ride would compromise safety, undercutting one of the most-often heralded justifications for the technology.

It was just this kind of tuning to minimize excessive