[jetpacktuxedo]

Them competing to be the safest means that none of them are as safe as they could be working together, though.

If every company has their own secret suite of test cases then different companies can specialize in different aspects of safety, and different AIs will be tuned to watch for different conditions.

Imagine if instead of that they all worked together to define a rigorous test suite. Then they would all be striving to excel against all of the tests that the best of them could come up with. Wouldn't that result in more rigorous testing than any individual company would do? Especially if the results of all of the tests were public?

To go another step further, imagine an open carAI platform that had the aforementioned test suite and a full simulation platform for testing changes, with different car manufacturers represented on a committee that oversees the carAI platform. Separate the smarts from the base car a bit and have some sort of abstraction layer between the smart bits and the car bits. As long as the abstraction layer is configured properly then different AIs would be interchangeable/upgradeable on the same base hardware. All car companies (and tech companies, and interested individuals) could collaborate on building the best, most efficient, safest car AI possible. People on older hardware would get all the same safety improvements as people on newer hardware (though hardware improvements would obviously improve things like sensor quality and quantity and the like), there wouldn't be fragmentation between ai ecosystems with poorer people trapped on older releases with lower safety standards while the rich get the latests and greatest and safest cars, etc.

Obviously competition is better than nothing, but is it really better than an open, collaborative alternative?

[simion314]

I agree, I also think this self driving component should be standardized, maybe more then one standard but you should be able when you buy the car to decide if you want the AI or not, and if you want it to chose the AI package from company X,Y or Z.

Maybe making the component open source would be the best for the citizens.

[greedo]

Yes, competition is better than collaboration. Collaboration gets bogged down in committees, with each shareholder trying to protect their turf. Competition leads to improvements as companies try to find an edge/advantage over their competitors.