I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it correctly involves a) high situational awareness, which we suck at because we get distracted, and b) making split-second calculations, which we suck at because we panic and our reflexes aren't that fast. I mean, this is a simple situation, when it comes down to it:
Something runs out into the road.
- Can you swerve and avoid hitting it without hitting anything else or driving off the road? If yes, do. If no:
- Can you hit the brakes without endangering anyone behind you? (Humans tend to have trouble with this decision, because half the time we forget to watch the rear view mirror and now there's no time to check. An AI would ALWAYS know what was behind it.) If yes, do. If not:
Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal. If the thing in front of you is a squishy human and the thing behind you is a car protected by all the engineering that protects cars in crashes these days, hit the brakes.
That's all there is to it, 99 % of the time. Sure, this is a situation where AI might make the wrong decision in 1 % of cases, but it's also a situation where humans are wrong much more than that.
<em>How do you deal with a lack of markers on the road?</em>
This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads. Sure, that would require driving down all roads in a specially-engineered expensive vehicle with a dedicated crew, so you think it sounds like unaffordable insanity until you realize google has already done it once, for the googlemaps mapping project. Just do it again, this time in a car made for spray-painting markers instead of mapping stuff.
Apart from that, the overwhelming majority of problems on the road can be solved by yielding even when you're technically in the right and just slowing the heck down, if necessary to walking speed and below. There will still be problems that only a human being can solve, but there's going to be a human being in the car, so worst case, pull over and ask them. If your human is drunk or underage, pull over, wait for the next passing car, watch how their human solves it, and do what they did. In the rare case where there's no other car likely to pass any time soon and the human in the car is incapacitated - possibly some sort of remote solution would work, where a human in some kind of remote driving center can take control of your car for a minute if necessary?
There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient. And so far we've accepted a LOT of occasionally-deadly shit if it's sufficiently convenient. (Trains. planes. Nuclear reactors. Every single one of those things had waves of protests and people going "It will never work, and when it fails, people will die! Not worth it!"
And occasionally they failed, and people died, but we still keep using them.