Data & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru...
"Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though
Thank you, I had not found this one.
What I had considered is that in the case of self-driving cars, nobody is criminally accountable, even though the rest of us may be criminally negligent should we make some horrific error. Philosophically, there is some kind of reason that criminal acts require punishment beyond mere financial liability (e.g., prison time) and self-driving cars are exempted from this. Currently, self-driving cars are also exempt from the actual laws of the road because the police are dis-empowered to enforce anything on the self-driving car.
Thank you for this--I remember reading this paper when it came out, but forgot it by the time I wrote this section. Will add a citation.