[tuacker]

Aside from a plane dropping out of the sky onto the direct road ahead, would a sufficiently well implemented self driving car ever end up in such a scenario?

The most basic rule of driving is to adjust your distance & speed to the surroundings/conditions. You should always be able to come to a complete stop without hitting anything. Obviously we humans suck at taking everything into account, but would the same hold true for self driving cars?

[cortic]

Swerve (with 60% chance of survival) or break (with a 40% chance of survival). This may sound like sci-fi, but its simple math; if you know the distance of the hazard, coefficient of friction and speed. And you can crunch numbers really fast, these percentages are part of the decision process. And one puts the public at risk and the other puts the driver at risk. Now even if you had no more information and a utilitarian programmer decided to go with the numbers and swerve; swerving off-side will generally endanger the driver and near-side generally will endanger the public.

These decisions seem unavoidable.

[andrepd]

These conundrums are irrelevant anyway. Over one million people die every year on the roads. The instant AI becomes better than humans, it's a moral imperative to adopt it, no matter what it does in these rare and contrived circumstances.

[cortic]

If this is your motivation then you will want the car to always default to saving the driver over pedestrian. To do otherwise would discourage adoption.

Not sure i'm so comfortable with this; it will result in a number of people killed who never accepted this risk and might have been safe. In order to save a number of people who accepted risk in the first place.