I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think with the self driving car example having diverse competing approaches helps avoid stagnating on a local optimum.
Right, but whats the point if you can never learn about these different approaches and freely discuss them and improve them? I mean there could be two people in an apartment building in the valley banging their head on their desk over the same issue and they could never talk to each other about it due to NDA.
We all learn about collaborating and helping people with their issues——really just teaching each other, the best way to learn imo——with capstone projects in engineering schools, then we forget it all when we enter the workforce and sign our NDAs and suddenly gag ourselves from talking about our work to other people in the field.
