Car occupants are already treated, by the entire motoring industry, the whole transport infrastructure, and society at large, as more important than pedestrians. Participating in a fake thought experiment asking you to consider the relative dispensability of different categories of pedestrians is hardly an act of resistance to that culture. It's not a disinterested thought experiment - it's a piece of industry-backed propaganda at a crucial moment in the rise of autonomous vehicles. Just as the haulage industry is taking a gamble on bullying people out of the way and revealing in the process (to those who care to look) that its vehicles are too dangerous and its practices too reckless to share space with people, so the autonomous car industry is staking everything on a controlled road environment that will prioritize the movement of vehicles. It's asking you to miss the obvious faultline - the opportunity for vulnerable road users to claim the environment for themselves. Autonomous vehicles could be a wonderful thing, but only if they are understood in a way that is antithetical to the ideology of the private car.
