Most accidents are also decisions. They just often involve unconscious ones, or ones made in a split-second without thinking (e.g. "do I swerve this way or that

Most accidents are also decisions. They just often involve unconscious ones, or ones made in a split-second without thinking (e.g. "do I swerve this way or that way?"). Humans aren't that good at doing detailed cost-benefit analyses during split-second decisions, and so we call the results "accidents", but all that really means is the human wasn't skilled enough/fast enough to prevent the problem, whereas a computer in many cases will be. If a driverless car is forced into a situation where it has to have a potentially-fatal collision with someone, a human in the same situation would have the same problem. So really, the only question comes down to, what's the ethical approach to deciding how an AI should prioritize human life? If a driverless car is forced into a situation where it must kill one of several people, who dies? (in practice that probably comes down to figuring out which action is the least likely to result in a fatality, even if all actions are extremely likely to result in one they're not going to have identical probabilities) And perhaps more interestingly, if the car has to decide between probably killing its driver, and probably killing someone else, which way does it decide? (though again, this probably comes down to which person is more likely to survive the accident, and that's probably going to be the driver because they're protected by multiple safety systems whereas someone walking along the road is not)