Better algorithms
<blockquote>However, he added, "I do not think that real-time, human driving decisions can provide an acceptable basis for the ethical programming of self-driving cars" because "it is not a good idea to create rules based on impulses".</blockquote>
As part of the emergency services, I was trained on how to deal with these situations from a practical point of view. The philosophical discussions are all very nice and interesting, but not useful in a real scenario. Same goes for emotion-based responses.
In our case, the general principle was "treat those to whom the treatment is most likely to be effective in terms of assuring their survival". In practice, this may mean having to treat an attacker in preference to one of your colleagues, to put an example, which can be emotionally taxing to say the least, but we were not there to play God.
Also, the so-called trolley problem and similar thought exercises are embarrassingly one-dimensional to be useful. E.g., what stops the signalman from politely asking the people gathered on the tracks to move elsewhere? Why was there people on the tracks? Why was the trolley not working as intended? Why were there not emergency brakes on the tracks? What if going for the group will likely result in multiple non-life threatening injuries as opposed to an assured casualty? Etc., etc.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
