Pretty sure the million dollars was not meant seriously. There are plenty of regulated fields in which people still participate, despite various risks of liability. Professional engineers, doctors, every Uber driver in the US, who could potentially be punished for negligent driving while on the job. The point, I think, is that the current level of responsibility for writing bad code is essentially zero, but should probably be higher for some applications.

I most definitely don't agree with him, and I find the idea absolutely repugnant. Devils advocate though, I would be much more careful with the code that I write if regulators passed some dogshit law like that.