People in the self-driving tech industry have long been fascinated with a psychological thought experiment known as the trolley problem, in which participants must make ethical choices among grim fictional scenarios.
Standing beside a lever that could alter the path of a runaway trolley, should you let it continue unabated and run over five people tied to the tracks ahead? Or save those five people by throwing the switch, and instead sacrifice two bystanders who otherwise wouldn't have been harmed?
Various permutations of the trolley problem exist, and the latest comes from an unexpected place: the outgoing White House administration.
In his final hours as president, Donald Trump issued a pardon to Anthony Levandowski, the self-driving engineer who pleaded guilty to a single count of stealing a trade secret from Google and bringing it to his new job at Uber.
A White House announcement of the pardon noted "his sentencing…