[carapace]

I would support laws that said, in effect, you can't compete on safety. Meaning, if one self-driving car[1] company comes up with the software equivalent of the seatbelt or the airbag I think they should not get exclusive right to implement it. They should have to share that with the other companies. I don't see how doing otherwise wouldn't put safety above profit.

So how do you compete? I don't know. Along other dimensions, I guess.

There is another aspect of this that I want to bring up: auto-autos should share data with each other and with the surrounding traffic infrastructure in real-time, for safety and for dynamic traffic-shaping. They should be able to cooperatively track pedestrians and non-automated vehicles. The cars and the roads and the signals and something like Waze should all be integrated and cooperating for maximum safety and efficient throughput with low latency. And they should all share experience (training data) of normal and exceptional events across the whole fleet (regardless of manufacturer.) Optimizing across the whole thing will be, uh, optimal. From this POV, non-cooperative behavior (due to the profit motive or just people being people) by any single actor will be seen as a bad-faith move and the network can be expected to route around it one way or another.

[1] Please, let's call them "auto-autos".