How should autonomous cars make life-or-death decisions? In the best of worlds, they won’t.

It’s clear that road accidents remain a major issue. Each year, more than 1 million people die on roadways around the world. In the United States, almost 40,000 people die each year because of crashes, and that trend is mirrored across the Washington, D.C., area, where traffic fatalities rose slightly last year despite the pandemic.