Agreed that even a continuous brick wall would be relatively safe for an approximately tangent collision at 30 mph.
The concern would come from a break in a guardrail or a series of concrete columns/bollards with a pedestrian crossing, where the car could strike an abutment. (Think of "Jersey barriers" lined up in a construction zone through which a zebra crossing lies. That's an easy abutment scenario and striking a line of Jersey barriers end-on at 30mph provides a deceleration approximately equal to a 30 mph head-on collision with an opposite direction car of equal mass also traveling at 30 mph. That's going to be a massive shunt.)
I agree there's an overhyping in the title, "programmed to kill", but the decision of "cause a near-certain harm to a pedestrian" vs "cause the car to leave the known roadway and suffer/inflict unknown and unknowable harm" is a very legitimate concern.
(I worked as an intern for Daimler on a completely autonomous bus. Our only fallback was "mash the red E-stop button [shutting off the computer servos] and manually take over", so we literally never let the vehicle exceed what the human safety driver was comfortable with, but eventually that's going to go away for fully autonomous vehicles.)
