"Brakes are a means of expressing Fear" - HST, allegedly

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Step 1) Attempt to improve braking performance of rim brakes by developing disc brakes
Step 2) Realize disc brakes are a little TOO good at braking that they are actually less good at stopping the bike
Step 3) Develop a new system to mitigate the over-effectiveness of the disc brake system
Step 4) Profit

I'm going to get my popcorn ready for this one. I'm hoping that it doesn't go down the way ABS for motorcycles went down. The first versions of those were downright scary. That created an entire generation of riders who claimed that they could outbrake an ABS system, and ABS was total BS and a deathtrap. Nowadays, motorcycle ABS systems have been proven to outperform even world-class riders, and yet there remain those folks that were so put off by the really bad first-gen systems that they make it their mssion in life to trash ABS constantly.

For my learning, what's the failure mode of ABS on a motorcycle? Same as a car? Dummy light on the dash and suddenly you have reduced hard/wet braking ability?

Or would it basically equate to bike hydraulic disc brakes with without ABS in case of a failure?

For this to work, you need a VSS just like a car/motorcylcle has on both the front and rear. Then a balancing mechanism in between. And not a Garmin speed sensor on a hub either. You need an accurate real deal VSS.

This is just too too much for a bicycle.

(VSS = vehicle speed sensor)

The failure mode on the early systems that caused so much consternation was an overly "intrusive" ABS system. It would intervene early and often, and pulsed in a pretty unsettling way. The combination of really extending braking distances and pretty rough pulsing (understandably) freaked people out.

A VSS is a pretty rudimentary device. It's just a ring with notches and a sensor. In the second photo in the linked article you can see the VSS. It's the smaller metal ring with notches cut in it, and the sensor that picks up the pulses when the ring is rotating.

IMO the "strain gauge" inside of the Elite trainers would be well suited as a VSS. Dual purpose (at least for the rear wheel).