Of course self-driving cars cannot think. When looking back at this article, you can see that what we do intuitively takes multiple steps for a car to reproduce and still causes trouble to us.
A simple scenario where a car is stopped in the middle of the road can cause trouble. Today, some AI models can determine if a stopped car will stay stopped (parked) or will move (simply stopped). From that we can decide a scenario of overtaking if it is safe …
In a situation as you describe, self-driving cars are most certainly not the best way of doing things. However, I can easily imagine self-driving cars communicating with eachother and with the environment. We could imagine self-driving cars reacting to the ambulance siren and automatically pulling over.
Many things are to be expected, but we need to plan them and teach the car… at least for now !
