Sounds pretty close to the heuristic I expect real-world autonomous machines to follow, which is "do the thing that is least likely to cause a lawsuit." Doing

Sounds pretty close to the heuristic I expect real-world autonomous machines to follow, which is "do the thing that is least likely to cause a lawsuit." Doing nothing is generally seen as more innocent than doing something, at which point I'd expect most mobile robots to freeze when something goes wrong.