[welp]

Whether or not you believe in the climate crisis or global warming, I strongly recommend all proponents of driverless cars to read The Energy Glut[1] in order to get a good idea of one potential scenario of how America will end up if every man and his dog can use a car to get anywhere. If anything, the studies which are referenced in the book are rather hard to ignore.

As a quick example of the sort of thinking in this book: more cars on the road means that there will be fewer people willing to risk being outdoors anywhere near a road (i.e. most residential areas in this day and age), resulting in higher levels of obesity. As more people become obese, fewer people are willing to walk or cycle ever-decreasing distances, so they get a car -- increasing the number of cars on the road. After that, we enter a rather vicious circle. The average weight of the world population will increase rather quickly, and we will end up like the people in Wall-E. I'd rather ride my bike, but thanks for the offer.

[1] http://zedbooks.co.uk/paperback/the-energy-glut

[MordinSolus]

Then let them be obese. It is not my responsibility to make sure other people don't get fat. We shouldn't stifle innovation (if that's what you're getting at) because we're scared that people will get.. even more fat.

And isn't obesity more about diet than it is exercise anyway?

[welp]

Hah, that's a fair approach. From what I can understand, obesity is more about the lack of opportunities to exercise rather than the amount of calories eaten (see http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/01/17/maps-show-striking-corr... for an example, although obviously correlation != causation). It seemed to be the case that as the number of cars on the road increased, calorie intake actually went down.

[Lost_BiomedE]

If the cars were safer and more aware of pedestrians, like what we have seen from google car demos, I would be much more confident crossing the street, etc.

[welp]

That depends, I would be more than happy if they were limited to 20mph. If they were limited to something more like 40mph, I would just make kids stay the hell away from roads: http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm

That said, I would be interested in seeing how driverless cars perform at stopping in the case of sudden and unexpected obstacles compared to human drivers?