Owning a car slowly becomes a status issue, like keeping horses, rather than a necessity.
There is no reason to expect this to be true. Outside of densely populated urban centers, it is likely that most people would still have good reason to prefer ownership. Providers in less dense areas could not deliver cars as quickly to riders as they could in densely populated areas. The main benefit to consumers of cabs in big cities is that you don't have to worry about parking, which is expensive, rare and time-consuming. In suburban and rural areas parking is very easy.
Bike-share programs have been noted for a tragedy of the commons, with people vandalizing, stealing, and just generally abusing their borrowed bikes, because they don't own them and security is hard. Robo-cabs will have similar problems, which will increase costs and reduce desirability at the margins.
Think of cities that already can't be car cities, like Manhattan or London. I live in London and owning a car would be an expensive liability. I borrow or hire one roughly once a year.
Think of robo-cars as public transport infrastructure - more so than cabs.
Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: How Robot Cars Are Near
WHEN: 19 December 2012 07:30:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: Berkeley, CA
Location and time for this Wednesday's meetup are confirmed! It will be at 7:30pm (not 7pm) at Zendo. I will not be there, but Michael Keenan will be giving a talk about robot cars.
Michael Keenan is an entrepreneur, activist and futurist who works with The Seasteading Institute and the Center For Applied Rationality. His talk, How Robot Cars Are Near, describes how robot cars will save millions of lives, billions of hours and trillions of dollars.
Michael will also be speaking at the Extreme Futurist Fest on December 22.
For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong
or call me at:
http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png
Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: How Robot Cars Are Near