I'm not sure about that. If your car had uncontrolled acceleration, for instance, would you consider use a crowd of people to slow you down or would you put it in the ditch? For the sake of argument that amounts to a left or right turn.
Say there are 10 people in this crowd. The optimal solution for the 11 of us is obviously to have my car drive off a cliff to the right, not into the crowd on the left. However, for me, the optimal solution is obviously to not drive off a cliff.
However, your argument omits a couple of interesting details. First off, if a car can have uncontrolled acceleration, it can likely have any number of glitches. It may for example think it's accelerating uncontrollably, and try to throw me off a cliff. Or it may think that the cliff is a small ditch. Or it may think that a bunch of balloons tied to a mail box is a crowd. If you are a programmer, what would you rather debug: code that prevents uncontrolled acceleration or code responsible for killing the driver by recognizing crowds and cliffs?
The other details is whether the metaphorical crowd should even allow me to buy a car that has logic built into it to drive over them. What if instead of a cliff and a crowd it's actually two different crowds of different sizes? What would a human driver do in these cases?
Humans typically avoid creating the choice between crowds to drive into (by following traffic laws, slowing down when there are obstructions in the street, etc.).
I haven't tried to figure out what the numbers are, but my gut expectation is that vehicles driving into crowds is so rare that there aren't really statistics about it.
As a person and a driver I'm willing to say the car should drive off the cliff.
As a developer I wouldn't buy a car that would drive off the cliff.
It's a tough problem. Personally I would make a quickly/poorly thought out analysis of how to do the least damage. Being human I'd probably get it wrong.
I am more or less in the same boat as you. I do however think that a simple algorithm of "save people in the car" is better than "try to save objects identified as people outside the car" because it is simple and in the long run likely very effective. Making computers make moral/ethical decisions is difficult, especially with poor inputs.
A developer knows, through hard-won experience, that the algorithm to decide whether driving over a cliff is better for everyone is bound to have bugs, and will therefore gladly throw you off a cliff when it is the wrong thing to do ;(
Non-developers would assume the computer to be (somewhat) infallible.
I think a more realistic moral scenario is this: you come around a bend, and there's a five year old on a tricycle in the road. He shouldn't be there; but he is. Do you plow over him, with minimal damage to the car, or try to break/avoid him with the risk of going off the road and into the ocean below - or hitting the cliff?
What if you're in your car with your family?
The best answer is of course: never let the car travel so fast this scenario happens - but given the possibility of an oil spill around the bend -- that might be very slow indeed.
