Post #3992256

Have you seen this new-fangled stuff called "automobiles"? They are everywhere! Their producers are showing them down our throats whether we want them or not. One chap, called Ford, has even built something called a "conveyor belt", where their production is streamlined so that he could produce even more of the things faster. With these things, any incompetent horse rider can reach farther and faster than an experienced rider. This is disgusting! If they become widespread, people will unlearn how to ride a horse! And what man is a real man if he can't even ride a horse?! People keep saying an automobile gets you from London to Edinburgh in a day. But where is the accomplishment in that? A horseman who makes the same journey has demonstrated endurance, skill, planning, and a bond with his animal. With an automobile, anyone can simply sit there turning a wheel. We are replacing mastery with convenience. Imagine courting your sweetheart by arriving in an automobile instead of on horseback. Where is the romance? Where is the dignity? Machines are replacing genuine human experiences. Today it's an automobile. Tomorrow every family will own one. Then people will refuse to walk anywhere. Before long, humanity will forget how to use its own legs! Mark my words: children raised with automobiles will never develop proper horsemanship. They'll grow into adults incapable of saddling or shoeing a horse, repairing a harness, reading tracks, cleaning a stable, or fixing a broken wagon wheel. Future generations will be helpless the moment an engine fails. We are outsourcing essential life skills to noisy machines! Civilization is doomed. I have already heard stories of wealthy gentlemen arriving at riding competitions in automobiles. What's next? Will they claim they have "travelled" somewhere merely because a machine did all the work? At present, only the wealthy own automobiles. They tell us prices will fall eventually, but that sounds exactly like something someone selling automobiles would say. Also, suddenly everyone who bought an automobile last Tuesday is an expert on transportation. They spend their evenings explaining to lifelong horse breeders why horses are obsolete. Don't tell me these machines are "innovative". Every automobile merely follows roads that horses established centuries ago. Remove the roads built for horses and these mechanical carts become completely useless. An automobile has never invented a destination. It merely follows roads laid down by humans. Every mile it travels was first imagined by a horse. And notice how every automobile salesman insists this is "progress". That's precisely what worries me. Every disastrous idea in history has been sold as progress. And then, there are even bigger versions of these things, called "busses" that can transport lots of people at once. Think about the buggy drivers! There will be mass layoffs in that industry. But let's think beyond buggy drivers. What about blacksmiths? Saddle makers? Stable boys? Harness manufacturers? Hay merchants? Veterinarians specializing in horses? Entire towns survive because horses exist. Have the automobile people offered even one serious plan for these workers? No - they simply shrug and call it "innovation." And unlike a horse, you can't feed an automobile by just letting it graze in the field. No sir, it requires a special chemical liquid, called "gasoline". Of course, that thing doesn't just fall from the sky. Nope, you have to look underground for *another* liquid, called "oil", extract it (a very expensive process), and distill it into various components (an even more expensive process), only one of which is gasoline. Clearly, this whole thing is economically unsustainable! And how are you going to get this liquid to the automobiles? You can't just sell it in the grocery store and have people bring it home in buckets. The thing is very volatile and highly flammable! You'd need a huge system of "gas stations" to which you'll have to deliver the gasoline in a secure way and where people will have to go to top up their automobiles. Gas stations, which, undoubtedly, will have to be hugely subsidized with our tax dollars! We are expected to rebuild the entire nation around these things! Roads widened, bridges strengthened, signs erected, traffic rules invented. An invention that requires the entire world to reorganize itself cannot possibly be a good invention. And have you seen the speed at which these things move? If there are many of them on the roads, accidents will be unavoidable! Hundreds of thousands of people will die every year! But do their producers care about human lives? Of course not - they care only about money. Every week there's another headline: "Automobile crashes into tree." Curious how nobody prints "Horse reaches destination safely for the 12,847th consecutive time." Clearly, the only sensible solution is to require every automobile to travel no faster than a horse, and perhaps to have a man walking fifty yards ahead waving a red flag. And what about the environment? Sure, a horse farts from time to time and shits on the streets - but have you felt how these "automobiles" smell? They are sure to make the air in the cities unbreathable! BTW, I have noticed that the loudest proponents of automobiles are precisely those too lazy to spend six hours in the saddle. Curious. To sum it up, these "automobiles" are dangerous, they kill people, they are environmentally destructive, socially corrosive, economically unsound, require vast infrastructure, put countless horse-related professions out of business, and fundamentally incapable of replacing the horse. Once investors realize this, the entire automobile bubble will collapse, leading to a depression larger than anything we've experienced before! This was, of course, a rant about AI. History has a habit of proving both sides half right. The enthusiasts underestimate the problems. The opponents underestimate the adoption.