That makes it hard for a person, especially if they're new to that road, but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing?
Who said a self driving car is doing a "database lookup"?
If anything, a good self driving car should NOT do any kind of database lookup (of the location of traffic lights etc) and be able to recognize and respond to a moved, impromptu (e.g. because of road work), new, unfamiliar, etc. traffic light.
A level 5 self-driving car would work completely autonomously without any prior knowledge of the area it's driving in. We're not there yet.
Perhaps I should have said that its a hard light for humans but that I don't know anything about how hard it is for cars.
This mechanism really shouldn't be susceptible to the same biases as humans. The described signal may legitimately be more challenging for the self driving car, but more than likely the signal was missing from Uber's database. Their lack of explanation for this failure does not inspire confidence in their approach.
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/zkolter/pubs...