> Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses.

Another way to see it: A horse (or any animal) is a goddamn nanobot-swarm with a functioning hivemind that is literally beyond human science in many important ways. Unlike a horse:

* Your car (nor even half of them) does not possess a manufacturing bay capable of creating additional cars.

* Your car does not have a robust self-repair system.

* Your car does not detect strain its structure and then rebuild stronger.

* Your car does not synthesize its fuel from a wide variety of potential local resources.

* Your car does not defend itself by hacking and counter-hacking attacks other nanobots, or even just by rust.

* Your car does not manufacture and deploy its own replacement lubricants, cooling fluid, or ground-surface grip/padding material.

* Your car is not designed to survive intermittent immersion in water.

In both a feature-list and raw-computation sense, we've discarded huge amounts in order to get a much much smaller set that we care more about.

Ah, good point. Then the global warming point applies, but in a much less trivial way.

There is turbulence in any big directed change. Better overall new tech often creates inconveniences, performs less well, than some of the tech it replaces. Sometimes only initially, but sometimes for longer periods of time.

A net gain, but we all remember simpler things whose reliability and convenience we miss.

And some old tech retains lasting benefits in niche areas. Old school, inefficient and cheap light bulbs are ironically, not so inefficient when used where their heat is useful.

And horses fit that pattern. They are still not obsolete in many ways, tied to their intelligence. As companions. As still working and inspiring creatures.

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I suspect the history of evolution is filled with creatures getting that got wiped out by new waves, that were more generally advanced, but less advanced in a few ways.

And we have a small percentage of remarkable ancient creatures still living today, seemingly little changed.

There's stuff horses can do better than even the best of our current technology. Where that stuff matters, horses are still employed.

Where cars displaced horses, it's because they're strictly better in a larger sense. On the city streets, maybe a car is louder than a horse, but it's also cheaper to make, easier to feed, and doesn't shit all over the place (which was a real problem with scaling up horse use in the 19th century!). Sure, cars shit into the air, but it's a more manageable problem (even if mostly by ignoring it - gaseous emissions can be ignored, literal horse shit on the streets can't).

And then, car as a platform expands to cover use cases horses never could. They can be made faster, safer, bigger, adapted to all kinds of terrain. The heart of the car - its engine - can be routed to power tool attachments, giving you everything from garbage trucks to earth movers, cranes, diggers, to tanks; it can be also taken outside and used as a generator to power equipment or buildings. That same engine can be put in a different frame to give you flying machines, or scaled up to give you ships that can carry people, cars, tanks, planes or containers by the thousands, across oceans. Or scaled up even more to create power plants supplying electricity to millions of people.

And then, building all that up was intertwined with larger developments in physics, material engineering, and chemistry - the latter of which effectively transformed how our daily lives look like in the span of 50 years. Look at everything around you. All the colors. All the containers. All the stuff you use to keep your house, clothes, and yourself clean. All that is a product of chemical industry, and was invented pretty much within the last 100 years, with no direct equivalent exiting ever before.

This is what it means for evolution accelerating when it moved from genes to information. So sure, horses are still better than stuff we make. The best measure of that advantage is the size of horse population, and how it changed over the years.