Every time I got the option to swerve into a barrier instead of killing a person I took it. By getting in a car you’re accepting the risk that entails, especially when it’s a self driving car with experimental tech. Pedestrians made no such deal, so they shouldn’t have to take on that risk.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/10/22/165469/why-self-...
To make anything else happen, you'd need to regulate. But the "self driving altruism act", which mandates that e.g. the car you just bought must kill your family in order to save pedestrians you don't know - I think it might be really difficult to get that law passed. You might be able to make some headway with fleets.
IMHO markets, human nature and politics constrain the solution space for "self driving moral dilemmas" to a small subset of what's theoretically possible.
There are plenty of cases of people trusting the existing automated systems that specifically disavow being good enough to trust anyone's lives to. Even in light of news that other people have died in so doing.
A self-driven car that doesn't watch out for non-passengers is likely to going to run afoul of the same sorts of laws that already exist to avoid drivers prioritizing themselves over anyone else. There's a case in SoCal now trying to make the manslaughter liability for this in a Tesla with autopilot enabled be assigned to the driver of the Tesla. It'll be interesting to see where that goes.
Drivers driving their own cars have a self-preservation instinct at work.
Walking in public entails risk that everyone accepts.
I don’t.
I don’t think there is anything ethical or just about killing drivers by default.
I'm actually not trying to argue against you, as indeed there is a gray area. My point is that on marginal situations we should not try to judge only on morality but also on creating incentives that best improve the system in the longrun.
Separately, I'm not a fan of arguments from evolutionary environments for this sort of thing. It didn't have telephone poles, but we still blame a pedestrian and not the pole or the pole installer if a pedestrian walks into it. Evolutionary arguments are almost always problematic when used in these ways.