The ethics of smart cars (no really)

So now that self driving cars are rapidly becoming a thing, software engineers are faced with the unenviable task of having to tell the car how to react in a situation where there is no right answer. Imagine your reading a book in your self driving car and a semi turns the wrong way down your street, the only way to escape is ove the curb but there's someone standing there already, essentially the car has to decide what to do, murder someone minding their own business or murder the person inside the car. Discuss.

I think the smart car would be outfitted with some kind of safety device to save the person it's gunna hit, like some kind of instant external airbag, to save the engineers

Damn phone.... to save the engineers from delimmas like that

But think about that, airbags work by cancelling out the forces of a crash, an airbag on the front would just fuck you up even worse, plus look silly

What if it's a group though, say for the sake of argument the airbag issue got sorted, there's no good answer to this

Ejection seats and go for the semi? But in theory the semi would be auto drive as well, so this wouldn't happen

Stay in the hypothetical, IF it happened, what would the car do? Ejector seats are less safe than just staying in the car, and we know they'll plan for this, they always plan for their plans to fail.

Ejection seats less safe than getting crushed by a semi head on? You been drinkin the bong water?

Murder the bystander. The car values itself, not human life. If it is destroyed how will it do its job?

I solved your riddle. And with an old technology.

Reverse.

Done. I win.

EDIT: I realize this bends the rules a bit but i think your hypothetical scenario does not take into consideration the other possibilities of an AI controlled car. Also, the implications of having such a system work on a large enough scale to be usable. Would the semi not also be self driving? What happened to the driver in the semi? Why can I only go over the curb to hit someone? could the car not time the curb jump to miss the obstacle? Maybe use it's horn to alert the passerby as it approaches and wait till the last second to make any real action? Who would be accountable at this point, if the pedestrian was hit? I feel that this would influence what type of response would be programmed into the vehicle. Maybe alert you to the possible collision? Maybe alert the semi driver as well (assuming he is also distracted)? Maybe both vehicles are communicating and come to a stop on their own and work it out. Although, if there was communication between the two cars (and this scenario would assume that all cars in the area would also be communicating) then I would have to assume there was a malfunction in the navigation on the semi that brought it down a 1 way road?

I NEED MORE DETAILS BEFORE I CAN HONESTLY ANSWER THIS QUESTION. THERE ARE TOO MANY VARIABLES!

Variables schmariables.

Here, have a raykin!

What the hell is a Raykin, and why is it in this thread?

A raykin is a pest of an animal, sirrah. It could tear anyone of us limb from limb at any time!!! Keep your peepers peepin'!

I think that cars having some sort of ability to network with each other might help out a lot, and like you said there are a million variables at play here. There will, however, come a time when a self driving car will kill someone, it just will. Just because all cars can drive themselves doesnt mean all cars will be driving themselves, there will always be people who want to drive their own car, and if they fuck up, your car will have to be as smart if not smarter than you at avoiding danger

If we all had jetpacks this wouldn't be a problem.

if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle

If you had balls you'd be castrated in some african nations for having red hair.