[ WP ] Your future self driving car has to choose between saving you or saving some strangers ( from r/futurology )

I feel my owner clutch onto my leather steering wheel. Then, she clutches a little tighter. She senses something wrong. It's old news. I've known for the past 374 microseconds that we're about to crash. 
 
 I've always thought it was weird that car manufacturers kept putting steering wheels in their self-driving models. It was a pointless endeavor, an exercise in utter futility, but it helped sell more cars. The people who had lived in the era of manual driving were put at ease by the presence of a steering wheel. The illusion of control comforts them. That's all it is though. An illusion. Hidden away under my exquisite paneling is a very real lack of connection between the ersatz maneuvering device and the wheels in my underbelly. Nevertheless, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling whenever she grabs on. It makes me feel connected to her, even if she is, in reality, completely disconnected from me. 
 
 I scan the road. Driving in the extreme left lane, my speed is relatively high. There are three baby on board signs within striking distance, each with a 37 % chance of actually containing a small child onboard. Behind me, an opulent Mercedez whose driver possesses a veneer of superiority and tax evasion motors along, but with four passengers. At my 2 o'clock, a 3-passenger car with a Jindal 2028 sticker. I'd driven my owner to several Martin O'Malley rallies. My onboard computer constructs a heat map, a probabilistic view of damage as a function of my decision tree. I have my information. Now, comes action. 
 
 I swerve into the sidewall and deploy my airbags. I feel the crunch as my front fender collapses in. My biosensors tell a gut-wrenching story. Her ribcage collapsed in simultaneously, and there's no signal on the heartbeat monitor. She's dead. 
 
 On the bright side, I'm not totaled. In fact, I think I've come out of this as unscathed as possible, exactly the way I'd calculated. I sit there and wait for an ambulance and clean up crew to drive themselves to the scene of the crash. Ordinarily, my programming would shut me down after an accident, but some wires got crossed in the collision, and I was left, alone, on the side of the road to wax philosophical. Perhaps `` self-driving car'' is a bit of a misnomer for what we are. The more apt description would be `` Selfish-driving.'' 
 

