Well surely not, if its a bird and you'd cause an accident with an emergency stop then you should continue. Dogmatic responses are exactly the problem with self-driving vehicles.

Sometimes it's preferable to hit something in your own vehicle. Cue the classic moral question of which person would you kill if you can only avoid one - with your vehicle - by hitting another.

Well, if a large bird - say - an emu or ostrich (but probably also a turkey) suddenly crosses your car's path I believe you would brake.

At least here (in the country) it is not uncommon that wild boars or deers cross the road suddenly at night, and I have seen cars literally destroyed by the collision, in some cases with the driver seriously injured.

Generally we should probably have vehicles follow proscriptions of the law when they can't avoid hitting anything and change the law if we want them to act differently. I've never seen a hypothetical self-driving car trolley problem where there wasn't a single option that was clearly what the law required.

By and large, the trolley problem concept is overblown. Most of the time the right/best answer is going to be to stand on the brakes and hope for the best.

But I'm honestly not sure what the law "requires" if you've got a scenario where there are going to be bad outcomes no matter what you do.

For instance if a car has the choice of hitting someone in the road or swerving onto the sidewalk and hitting someone there then clearly the legal thing to do is for the car to stay in its right of way and hit the person in the road.

That's a pretty clear case of taking a deliberate action to leave the road surface. But you can at least imagine scenarios where everyone is within the bounds of the road--say 5 people directly ahead and 1 off to the side.

As I say though, if you can't swerve to avoid people, the most reasonable action that most people would take--to the degree they had time to make a conscious decision at all--would be to brake as hard as they could and let things play out as they will.

Well yeah sure, but a bird is quite different to a person, it's small and usually not on the floor. I just meant it seemed strange to detect an object but not do anything about it because it's not labelled.

I think part of it comes down to reliability of the sensors - if you detect an object 200m down the road, 5 metres to the right and you have only a small error in the reading, you could easily get the impression that it's moving into the path of the car. However, if you can identify what it is then you can identify if it's likely that it really is going to move into your path. These sensors really aren't as perfect as you would hope which is why so much effort is being put into machine intelligence.