I am serious and any self-driving car engineer would agree with me. (I got this opinion from an AI lawyer at such a company.)
The truth is the opposite - not only will cars never make a "trolley problem" decision (because the only thing they should be doing is braking), it would be immoral to give them the capability, because it might decide it's in a trolley-problem scenario at the wrong time and randomly decide to sacrifice you.
I agree braking should be the default. But if any self-driving car out there steers to avoid collision, then it is already facing the 'trolley problem'.
In fact self-driving cars normally change lanes as part of their path finding. So a failure to change lanes in an emergency would be unusual.
Disagreement over the correct behavior will result in lawsuits of course. "It should have attempted to miss me!" vs "It should have stayed in it's lane!"
We'll need legislation to settle this, for insurance purposes at the very least.
It shouldn't do what's correct, but rather what's predictable. Anything else is less safe for other people around it.
If the brakes turn out not to work, that is quite the problem, but hopefully it'll notice in time to not accelerate in the first place. Maybe it can still engine brake.
You don't "choose" because, as I said, it is unsafe to program your system to make choices. You brake because that's what a car does.
Your problem isn't real because the car doesn't exist in a logical world with N or M discrete things, it exists in a real world where it can be mistaken about what's happening outside it. Letting it make choices like that would have a bad outcome if it hallucinates (occupant+1) grandmas in front of it and decides to heroically sacrifice itself and you.
> But if any self-driving car out there steers to avoid collision, then it is already facing the 'trolley problem'.
Even the tweet you've cited says:
> there is nothing in the street which you want to collide with. the correct response in every case is to evade the thing that's in the street.
(emphasis mine)
So braking is clearly not the only option.
I truly hope that you do not work on software or hardware that is in any way close to areas like this. You seem completely blind to the real world issues that driving (among other things) forces onto a system. Cars have brakes and steering wheels. Any real world system will use a combination of the two of them to try to keep the occupants and those outside the vehicle safe. Pretending that there will never be situations where there are conflicting choices to be made is ... well, I just find it unbelievable that anyone reading HN could try to deny that there will be situations like this.
The truth is the opposite - not only will cars never make a "trolley problem" decision (because the only thing they should be doing is braking), it would be immoral to give them the capability, because it might decide it's in a trolley-problem scenario at the wrong time and randomly decide to sacrifice you.