Sure, on the surface Taxi's are dead, but I would wager that it will be a lot slower than people on here think, not least for the difficulty of cleaning autonomous cabs.
Oh, and bonus: hiring an autonomous account will likely involve disclosing your identity in advance. If you're the sort of customer who makes a habit of fouling cabs, maybe you'll have to pay more to hire one.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/truck-driving-may-be-america-s...
Unless there is a really broad-based public backlash that makes it political suicide to continue licensing however, even if autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous I can't see municipalities and various institutions and agencies in general giving up the affiliated revenue stream. Even if we end up with something like Johnny Cabs [2] and no humans drive taxis any longer, I expect some form of government-imposed licensing to still exist.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/21/add-taxi-medallion-investo...
[2] http://www.empireonline.com/features/helpful-movie-robots-th...
1. families buy one autonomous car instead of several driven ones: when dad's arrived at work, the car goes back to become mom's car for the day. With a nice twist: when the car goes and fetch kids from soccer, mom doesn't have to be in it.
2. People pool cars privately: one car for a couple of families if they're light users, X/Y cars for X families for more intensive users. It's shared property, neither a taxi activity nor even a company providing a service.
2bis. Some AirBnB of autonomous cars facilitates mutual lending of cars, in parallel with the development of privately organized pools
3. Cars are leased instead of bought upfront, from companies embedded with the AirBnB-of-autonomous-cars. What you have now is effectively an autonomous taxi company.
The economic pressure to get rid of drivers will be enormous. Sure, car makers and drivers won't like it, but all of the money that won't go there will be up for grab by other sectors. Think of trucks: not only autonomous trucks will drive 23h a day, but everyone who sells anything moved by truck will have their margin augmented by skipping drivers' salaries.
If medium and light truck bodies are aligned to a standardized set of chassis, then some of the fleets of delivery trucks that lay idle half the day or longer today can run around the clock, swapping bodies and switching duties when needed.
If we can automate quiet garbage pickup, then a garbage truck that usually only runs during the day can run around the clock.
If we can automate safe delivery of liquid fuels, then entire fleets of various fuel delivery trucks will lay off a lot of drivers.
The pattern I'm seeing is the actual driving might get automated, but the endpoint activities might not be subject to automation just yet, but that might only be a matter of time and possibly standardization.
I imagine cleaning autonomous cabs will be exactly the same effort than cleaning shared cars. Probably less if the car can drive itself to the depot.