Good idea, although suicidal or oblivious/impaired pedestrians might fail to make eye-contact.

Well, exactly. Those are the ones you slow down for.

I like it. This 'jumping in front of cabs' thing is huge in Russia and it'd be cool if AI could prevent that here.

We use eye contact because we can't infer what another person is thinking and we can't react quickly enough to their actual movements at car speeds. This latter isn't the case with automated vehicles, so eye contact shouldn't be necessary, as long as you get the vector algorithms right.