I would have agreed with you whole-heartedly two months ago: as a cyclist, it’s all too easy to get into a very toxic place in your mind because so many people are actively trying to kill you after you’ve pointed out they are patently unable drive a two ton vehicle and check twitter at the same time. That and conversations with drivers unable to comprehend that their stopping distance depends quite simply on their speed leads to simple, obvious recommendation: drive slowly, pay attention. And the trolley problem genuinely feels like an insult.
Since, we have seen what the second-tier self-driving cars (Uber, Tesla) are struggling with: they have to ignore static object along the road (lamp-posts) and they are not great at making a difference between those and traffic. You can’t stop every time there is something near the road that doesn’t move, so you have to use the likelihood that said thing is actually static to move forward. That turns into an arbitrage between dynamic driving and safety — still not a trolley problem, unless you compare the potential gains of reasonably fast self driving against the lives of people who look like lampposts.
I don’t know how or why Waymo doesn’t appear to have the same concerns. It might have to do with the extend or quality of their Lidar, the progress they made on object recognition, but they indeed do not have an obvious trolley-like problem to solve. If you consider how careful the automated driver has to be, you might see similar speed-vs-safety arbitrage requiring some minimal threshold or ratio. I can’t imagine that is nearly as relevant as good maps, clear understanding of local driving habits and expectations, but there could be some aspects of it, just because that’s how any optimisation problem is written.