This feels like a really tricky question, actually -- what to do when an moving object is headed towards a stopped self-driving car?
It's easy to say the car should be smart enough to move -- but what if, as it moves in one direction, the object (like a truck trying to avoid the car) suddenly swerves in that direction too? Then does the car become responsible for the collision?
And of course, it feels like there could be a real-world version of the trolley problem [1] -- what if there are 5 occupants in the vehicle who will be killed by an oncoming truck, but in the only direction where it can move out of the way, it will have to run over a single pedestrian?
Glad I'm not the one having to make these kinds of programming decisions.
It's easy to say the car should be smart enough to move -- but what if, as it moves in one direction, the object (like a truck trying to avoid the car) suddenly swerves in that direction too? Then does the car become responsible for the collision?
And of course, it feels like there could be a real-world version of the trolley problem [1] -- what if there are 5 occupants in the vehicle who will be killed by an oncoming truck, but in the only direction where it can move out of the way, it will have to run over a single pedestrian?
Glad I'm not the one having to make these kinds of programming decisions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem