there's no reason a self driving car has to kill anyone. The trolley problem should not exist for self driving vehicles anymore than it needs to exist for airplanes.
Nonsense. The instant there's somebody running into the street, too close for the car to stop, it has to hit them or dodge. Dodging off the road could kill passengers (hit a telephone pole) or somebody on the sidewalk. The very first day, self-driving software has to make this decision.
What you are talking about is completely plausible with today's technology (thank you Uber for proving it). And I don't think that your comment is unfair by any stretch...
...But there is still no reason why a self driving car cannot avoid everything once we have enough data. There are no surprises with self driving vehicles, for anything that could happen, we have access to that information long before it does happen (I believe waymo is touting 300 yards-ish => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8R148hFxPw&feature=youtu.be...). A car doesn't need 300 yards time to stop. it needs less 200 ft (or 274 meters) at full speed. If you see someone that even could create an accident, you just slow down till its not possible to kill someone. (yes I know there are limitations to the current technology)
So assuming that we have the sensor data (full coverage, at a distance, real time), and the models are capable of including these edge cases you referenced (e.g. people jumping out in the road). Why would we need to choose who to kill? Why would this decision be necessary?
The vehicle would likely do what a human would do: slam on the breaks.
Also, it has no way of knowing whether anyone would die.
And, finally, a good-enough car should see people from much farther away than a human, react faster, and drive slower (at the speed limit). That means someone would almost literally have to jump in front of the car to trigger this scenario.
All wishful thinking. A self-driving car has no better brakes than an ordinary one. The problem statement says they run into the street too close to stop, so seeing them from further away is irrelevant. Lastly the whole issue is, should a self-driving car ever leave the roadway to preserve a life, precisely because it doesn't know if that could be worse.
This software choice, again, has already been made in existing self-driving vehicles. It remains to be seen if the choice holds up in court, since the first lawsuit will set a precedent for all others.
The brakes themselves are no better, you can save time by removing the input lag between the driver and the controls. There's 20 feet of braking saved by not having to move your foot from the floor to the pedal.
Also the car can signal it's intent to the steering, braking, and throttle instead of the car having to guess at what the driver is doing from their inputs. A car knowing it has to swerve around something can react sooner and differently than if it has to guess that it's swerving around something.
> A self-driving car has no better brakes than an ordinary one
I didn't say that it does. It has better reaction time and drives more slowly. That makes its stopping distance much shorter than a human's.
> The problem statement says they run into the street too close to stop, so seeing them from further away is irrelevant.
No, it's not. Seeing them from further away means this problem happens less frequently. If this problem happens so infrequently that overall deaths go down, that's a huge improvement.
> should a self-driving car ever leave the roadway to preserve a life, precisely because it doesn't know if that could be worse.
This is still better than a human, because it could actually make a decision. A human doesn't have time to consciously decide what s/he wants to do.
