How about a statue of Muhammad? It would offend both Christians and Muslims and make no one happy. Sounds like a perfect government solution.

Americans travel something like 3 Trillion miles a year. If just 1% of cars are self driving thats 30 billion miles of testing a year. Far more driving than anyone could ever comprehend doing in a lifetime or 1000 lifetimes. Of course there will be some accidents during this time but the automation will quickly pass the abilities of 95-99% of the drivers out there fairly quickly. As soon as this technology becomes available and is proven (100 million miles or so of driving) people will be running to get self driving cars. 1 hour commute becomes 1 hour of internet surfing or even sleep. At a certain point that 1 hour commute might become 30 minutes as the percentage of self driving cars goes up due to less accidents, less congestion, no rubbernecking, no sun glare issues, etc. I only have a 25 minute commute and would love a self driving car. You have a son or daughter turn 16 (15,17,18) are you going to let them drive themselves or use a proven self driving car. Would you prefer they go out with friends who just got their license or a program that has trillions of miles under its belt. Self driving cars are a no brainer once the technology is in place. Of course there will be holdouts, there are people who still dont have cell phones, but the advantages far far far outweigh the risks.

You need to re-think the distribution model once humans are removed from the equation. One potential, UPS opens a large number of very small completely automated warehouses across the country. Deliveries from the main distribution centers which currently can serve 100s of towns are broken out to the smaller ones that might only server a few square miles. From there small autonomous electric vehicles deliver to your house. Automated system gives you a call/text/email to confirm you are home for delivery and the truck is sent. You walk out and grab your stuff. No more deliveries when you are not home. Want it delivered at 2AM, no problem. Removing people from package distribution opens up a vast array of options and the company(s) that gets it right will make a ton of money.

Not sure truckers are the first to go but they are certainly on the list. I bet cabbies are the first to be chopped. Also on the list: UPS/Fedex, Postal Service, Delivery Services (Pizza for example). The 2nd order changes are also interesting - Parking Garage Attendants, Parking Meter enforcement, Traffic cops, and many more. None of these examples will completely go away but will be greatly reduced. We will still need truck drivers (which will become just passengers) that are trained in delivering hazmat materials to customers. Although these jobs will be lower paid than they currently are.

So I don't want to add to the debate around whether or not global warming is actually occurring or not but just assume that it is. How exactly is global warming bad?

So glaciers melt - they have melted before and came back in a few million years there is no reason to believe that this will not occur again. So we lose access to them now but this would happen eventually anyway. Sure not in our lifetimes but across the millions or billions of years before the sun kills the planet completely ice will come and go unless we find a way to control the natural process that regulates.

Glaciers melting lead to rising sea levels - well this means a few options accept the loss of land or put up barriers to protect it. You always hear that NYC will be underwater in X number of years. Of course it wont. Humans will find ways to solve that problem. Build dams, raise the island by bringing in extra soil, etc. Now a place like Florida does not have those type of options so likely it will slowly be sunk by hurricanes that destroy the sand barriers that we put up. Yes, entire towns will be destroyed in a storm but this happens today. It will likely be more frequent thus making it more difficult to make the decision to rebuild. Eventually people will move somewhere else. And during this process jobs will be created to rebuild homes, reinforce older homes, build dams, better water management process etc. It is said that global warming will cost X billion or trillion dollars. Well a lot of that will go into job creation oddly enough. "You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life."

We are killing the planet! - Ahh this old argument. There is nothing we can do currently to kill the planet. Nothing. Sure global warming might kill off a chunk of species that cannot adapt. Hell all out nuclear war might kill off 90% of the worlds species but life will survive and adapt. Over a million years or so the radiation will decay and the adaption process will continue. It would be a blip on the radar for the earth, kind of like the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs.

So as I see it global warming is just accelerating a natural process that would happen anyway some time in the future (hundreds, thousands or millions of years). Lots of money will be spent trying to fight or clean up the damage but that just means job creation. Species will adapt or die but over a long enough time period we will die off anyway (baring interstellar travel).

For a moment I thought it was novel too, then I thought about Shazam links in commercials. Those commercials on TV that have a popup that says use Shazam on this commercial to be taken to our website, a coupon, free samples, etc. This is almost exactly the same as what the patent is claiming however Shazam links are on a bit broader scale.