>There's an implicit decision there - choosing between you (the passenger in the autonomous vehicle) and the people on the street. Does the law ever require a

>There's an implicit decision there - choosing between you (the passenger in the autonomous vehicle) and the people on the street. Does the law ever require a person to break the law? That is the decision you've proposed the computer make. This is a serious question, not a pithy comment. Any action outside of immeditately stopping breaks the law: swerving into another lane involves changing lanes without signaling or entering into oncoming traffic. Swerving into the sidewalk breaks the law as well. I contend that we do very often say "it is unfortunate this situation but you complied with your instincts as they have been developed within the confines of traffic safety law." I also contend that fault is at stake and only fault can be considered at stake. We do not expect people to correct other humans' mistakes by breaking the law, correct? So why do we expect a computer to correct for all human's mistakes? There will certainly be tragedies involving autonomous vehicles. But to count that as a mark against the technology is holding it up to a standard we have never applied to any other technology. The computer merely acts in accordance with traffic laws. That there are two possible outcomes (passenger injury and pedestrian injury) does not imply that a choice has been made. In fact, those are not the only two outcomes, we've merely whittled it down to those for the sake of discussion.