1.  Difficult to implement, but a good idea.

  2.  Car headlights are far from sufficient - illuminating something at any distance requires a beam angle that coincidentally blinds oncoming traffic.  Furthermore, a motion sensor approach that turns off, say, any half-mile stretch of road without cars on it, is unfortunately impossible.  The high intensity discharge lamps (10x the efficiency of halogens, and easily focussable using reflectors) used in streetlamps are notoriously averse to on/off cycles - it takes a good half hour for the low pressure sodium lamps at the parking lot I use to warm up to usable temperature, and another half hour to cool down after shutting off to the point that they can be restarted without bursting from the heat load(sounds contradictory, but extremely high temperatures are involved).

  3.  These should be implemented, and in the near-desert majority of the American West, could (politically) be implemented this moment if you pitch the right people.

  4.  Drip irrigation is one of the essential techniques in green/lowenergy agriculture.  Subsurface water carriers are another.  Putting the water directly into the ground without any opportunity for evaporation, six inches from the plant it's targetting, is loads more efficient than spraying it into the air.  Underground, it can then catch on a buried drainpipe section and remain there saturating the soil until the plant's rootstructure reaches it.

  5.  Auto-brake(collision detection) can and is used now, but it' a race between dangerously preempting the driver for longer range threats that the driver is steering around, and not having the stopping distance to avoid a collision.  Auto-Swerving is of questionable legality, as it can easily cause an accident in and of itself.

  6.  Fantasy of biology.  Never gonna happen.
  7.  While tasers should be considered semilethal force, a much lower voltage stun gun placed in an ankle bracelet could be implemented as you say to great success.   A prisoner who can't stand up because of calf convulsions is a prisoner who can't continue a fight, without needing to have a guard confrontation or firearms involved.

We could very easily end most of the violence that happens in a prison using existing, cheap surveillance tech.  It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.  We rely on prison violence and rape as a part of the threat of a prison term.

I think a much more important development is decriminalizing nonviolent drug offenses.

  1.  Fantasy of human nature.  Never gonna happen.  In other news, emergency sirens have showed particularly good efficiency when playing tracks involving chopped up human screams.

  2.  This is how the price of depletable resources is supposed to work in a sufficiently large free market.  Utilities, however, are neither.  Good luck getting it accepted in the political arena.

  3. Not gonna happen, and besides, not needed:  the overweight and obese already pay more for personal transportation, insurance, etc.
Hello Squalish,

Thxs for the informative reply.

I think you have a winner with 3), btw - it could shave off perhaps 10% of daily water use in areas that import water at great expense.
Mandating that all toilet water comes from greywater could also be combined with things like a 'urinal flush' lever, and be granted an exemption on the 3.5-5 gallon toilet ban in the US, which is incredibly annoying and doesn't really save that much water - it just makes you flush your statutory 1.6 gallon toilet twice or three times.