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Comment by diminish | Hacker News Reader

We invented horseless auto mobile but required continuous human attention for steering and managing the machine. With a horse indeed we already had semi-driverless operation in some scenarios.

We are reinventing the "horse" - sometimes I think.

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I often remark that people really did want a faster horse.

Death's robot horse from Hickman's 'East of West', ideally. https://latimesherocomplex.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/easto...

How hard would it be to put an actual horse in control of a car?

You get the speed of a car, and the self driving of the horse (or some other animal).

Here's a brief history tracking the progress of developments in that area. I'm not sure where this tech lies on the Gartner Hype Curve though.

Pigeon controls missile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

Horse drives car - https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/videos/news-videos/buttersco...

Goldfish controls robot - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/robot_goldfish_tank...

edit to add one more as I realised that one of my favorite 'most worrying tech developments' fits right in...

Rat neurons cultured on silicon substrate control robot - https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-robot/

The difference is that a cars don't react unpredictably unlike horses. Spooked horses are very dangerous things and can run off on their own. We certainly wouldn't accept horse brained cars on the road.

a well trained knight's horse i think would be harder to spook than the most of the human drivers we have around.

Technically true but they would be more akin to a severe case of road rage. Those warhorses were kept isolated from others to be kept 'trained' in the right animal frame of mind and essentially meant to act like violent psychopaths - 'working as intended' was to attack anyone except the rider, even when the rider was unhorsed. There is a reason why they were rare, expensive, and why they also had separate general riding horses with much gentler temperaments who could actually share stables.

Romanticizing the past and thinking of it as an ideal that never really was and using it as a model is a rather dangerous pattern throughout history which has never really ended well.

One of the most common pieces of equipment for horses were 'blinkers' or 'blinders' - whose function was to limit their peripheral vision.

At least cars don't produce four tons of manure per year

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...

Worse, they produce 4.75 tons of CO2.

https://www.reference.com/science/much-pollution-average-car...

Surprisingly, the environmental impact of a horse is even higher.

Public transportation or perhaps electric scooters are the only sustainable ones.

walking & cycling.

Electric bikes can be quite enjoyable to ride, the Bafang BBSHD can make it a breeze to go up even steep hills here in Seattle at a swift clip.

The downsides come in the form of risk in transit (your in the weather, and have minimal to moderate protection from the road and others on it) and in securing your newfound transport in between use.

There are very few dry, secure placea to store bikes & scooters, and fewer yet that have an outlet to charge. Shared bikes and scooters mitigate this problem somewhat, but thus far they seem to have serious maintenance issues after relatively short periods outdoors. Who wants to ride a rattly transport device thats missing screws?

Its not so much of an issue if you own the bike. How many people work at a place that has literally nowhere to place a bike inside and no free power points to use. I have always placed my bike next to my desk.

Public transport and electric scooters only make sense in dense urban areas. In these places there's a critical mass of people that want to go to the same set of locations. This premise doesn't hold true in most of the world. Outside of dense urban areas public transport has no benefit from scale and is worse in terms of energy usage than private cars with plenty of other downsides.

Most of the world is not dense but most of the population is. Especially if you look outside of America.

I have been a proponent of electric scooters nonstop since a recent trip to Prague, where they have Lyme. I had a first date riding them around to no particular destination.

Unfortunately, the stupid helmet laws in my city (Melbourne) mean no one will ever use them even if we construct more bike lanes.

From what I heard, scooters can very quickly slam you in to the ground if you hit a hole/rock or if the front wheel turns 90 degrees which many of the company's scooters allow. Bikes seem much safer than scooters to ride helmetless.

Fun fact: I'd you go around older and we'll maintained European cities you'll see little holes with metal bars next to most front doors. Those were to scrape your shoes clean of all the street dirt (mainly horse products) before entering.

Pretty sure horses needed continuous human attention. "Driver" wasn't the operator of a machine, just like "car[riage]" wasn't originally an automobile.

Horses are pretty good at finding back to their stable on their own.

We're reinventing Nature anyway. When we'll have to go very tiny, green we'll have insects/animals. Except with a programmatic interface. Not sure which is best.

Maybe all of biology is the previous civilization reinventing nature. (Deep thought)

And I believe less consumption of fossil fuel

Automobiles consume much less fuel during long-term idle periods.

Unfortunately they also encourage much more use, and thus, less idle periods, long-term or otherwise.

However, automobiles require significantly more resources and energy to produce.

If Henry Ford had asked the people what they wanted, they would've asked for a better horse.

And what a better alternative world that would be...

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