I think the way I would say it is, after a few tens to hundreds of thousands of such events, we'll be able to estimate the parameters of the human preference functions associated with a non-fatal trolley problem (the real trolley problem is irrelevant to the car ML folks, they are not aiming to maximize global utility) and that will help guide our confidence in rolling out more.
For all the woe and gloom in the news reporting, Google (and Cruise)'s rollouts have been more or less what I expected: no enormous accidents that were clearly caused by a computer, but instead, a small number of small accidents usually due to the human driver of another vehicle doing something wrong. That seems to lead towards greater acceptance of self-driving cars and confidence that they are roughly as good as an attentive newbie.
The next big situation, I think, will be some really large-scale pileup with massive damages and deaths, and a press cycle where the self-driving car gets blamed. But the self-driving car collected a forensic quality audit log, which of course will aid the police in determining which human caused the accident.
I've been reading those DMV reports for years, and there are clear patterns which repeat. One is where an autonomous vehicle started to enter an intersection with poor sight lines to the cross street. Sensing cross traffic, it stopped, and was then rear-ended by a human-driven vehicle that was following too closely. Waymo has that happen twice at the same intersection in Mountain View. There's a tree in the median strip there which blocks the view from their roof sensor until the vehicle starts to enter the intersection. So the Waymo system advances cautiously until it has good sensor coverage, then accelerates or stops as required.
Humans tend not to do that, and, as a result, some fraction of the time they get T-boned.
AI should absolutely mimic the behavior of real (good) drivers.
Although that's not what you're describing here, another problem for AI could result from it knowing more than an average driver; for example, if a high-mounted LIDAR were able to see around corners and let the car decide it's "safe" to do a turn that no human would attempt for lack of visibility, that could cause problems.
(Also, it's surprising that an autonomous car doesn't detect that another car is following it too closely, and slows down appropriately in anticipation. How is this not taken into account.)
For all the woe and gloom in the news reporting, Google (and Cruise)'s rollouts have been more or less what I expected: no enormous accidents that were clearly caused by a computer, but instead, a small number of small accidents usually due to the human driver of another vehicle doing something wrong. That seems to lead towards greater acceptance of self-driving cars and confidence that they are roughly as good as an attentive newbie.
The next big situation, I think, will be some really large-scale pileup with massive damages and deaths, and a press cycle where the self-driving car gets blamed. But the self-driving car collected a forensic quality audit log, which of course will aid the police in determining which human caused the accident.