"Cars replaced horses"

"Cars replaced horses" This is what people say about LLMs, but it's based on a myth. Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary. In more rural areas, bicycles were extremely common. They were most associated with liberating women, who were more able to commute and meet with neighbours. Bicycles became a symbol of feminism - for sexists. When male students at Cambridge wanted to protest women's admission, the built an effigy of a woman student and burned it. The effigy was on a bicycle. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-45096690 This notion of women cyclists overstepping their place in society and being a menace to the social order appears in the 'Wizard of Oz'. In Kansas, a woman neighbour demands that the family give up Toto because he's been causing extremely minor mischief. Auntie Em tells the neighbour that she wishes to say what what she thinks of her, but can't as she is "a Christian woman". This places her in binary opposition with the neighbour who leaves on a bicycle. Toto escapes and as Dorothy goes to Oz, the woman transforms into a witch and the bicycle into a broomstick. Bicycles fell out of fashion in the US until mountain bikes, which are loaded with male gender baggage and unsuitable to riding while wearing a dress or for commuting. Households switched to cars which are expensive, so they tended to only have one, which men took to work and women were placed back in the home. Cars are a malign presence. Their use was not the advance of technology, but deliberate concerted efforts to harm the public sphere and especially to disempower women. They only became practical because of massive subsidies for highways and roads. They are an inherently wasteful technology, ill-suited to a majority of their current use cases.