Swerve to the Left

I was listening to an episode of TWiT when an interesting situation was brought up. It goes a little something like this: You have a self-driving car (really, the car is driven by a network of computers) and the car loses traction. The car brakes, but it isn't enough to completely correct the situation. A car approaching in the opposing lane reports that three of its occupants are children and only one is wearing a seat belt. Do you want the car to swerve to the left and kill the children or do you want the car (for which you spent $30k) to swerve to the right and drive off the cliff?

The answer is obvious: swerve to the left.

The fact that your car knows how many occupants are in the approaching car establishes the fact that the vehicles have the ability to quickly communicate with each other. Your car would have the ability to report to the other car that it will be occupying the oncoming lane for whatever distance and that its own lane will be vacant during that period. The oncoming car can swerve into your lane as you swerve into its lane and the collision is completely avoidable. If that sounds unlikely, remember that even moderately inexpensive desktop computers routinely perform 15 billion mathematical operations per second (by the time self-driving cars are commonplace, this number will be much greater) . That is more than enough time for each car to communicate and perform the necessary calculations to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

The same method would work if there was a long line of cars behind either (or both) of the vehicles. Because radio waves propagate unilaterally at the speed of light and computers perform calculations so quickly, your car could tell all of the cars in the affected lanes what is going on so that they can all react accordingly. Of course, they would also be communicating with each other in real time to ensure the safety of their own occupants. It would be trivial to implement an ad hoc network protocol between the cars (encrypting such a network would be more complicated and use some of the processing cycles, but would definitely be doable), and doing so would help create a much safer and more fluid traffic system