We are so far post automobile that it’s hard to compare, but many of the benefits are illusionary when you consider how society has evolved with them as commutes for example used to be shorter. Similarly the air used to be far cleaner and that’s after we got rid of leaded gas and required catalytic converters decades ago.
We have the benefit of hindsight but we're also making judgment calls looking back on fuzzy recollections, forgetting just how the past used to be before an innovation came along.
That said, there are modern enclaves without cars mostly on islands or in very remote locations. They make due just fine without cars, it’s the low population density that’s at issue for medical care.
1. how many people died because of lead poisoning, air pollution?
2. how many people were saved and had qualitatively better lives because of automobiles?
The people who did Freakonomics claimed that the drop in violent crime in the US in the 90s could be correlated to the phasing out of leaded fuel, but I'm not a statistician so can't speak to the accuracy of that correlation.
2. How would you even measure that? How would you define a better life thanks to a vehicle?
I feel like you're ice skating uphill a little given the deleterious effects of leaded fuels are well studied, but the question you're asking isn't.
Coal miners will fight for coal mines, the oil industry will fight for dependence on oil, and so on. Sometimes they’re aware of what they’re doing, but in the case of a comment like the above, apparently not so much.
Throughout our entire race as a species, abusers have always fucked the commons to the extreme using whatever tools they have available.
I mean take something as "innocuous" as the cotton gin, prior to the cotton gin there was a real decline in slavery but once it became extremely easier to process cotton slavery skyrocketed. Some of the worse laws the US has ever passed, the fugitive slave act, was during this period.
To think that technological progress means prosperity is extremely delusional.
We're still dealing with the ramifications of nuclear weapons and the likelihood that someone makes a committed nuclear attack will assuredly happen again in our species, just hoping that it doesn't take out all life on Earth when it happens.
Industrialization has rapidly accelerated planet wide climate change that will have disastrous effects in many of our lifetimes. A true runaway condition will really test the merit of those billionaire bunkers.
All for what? a couple hundred years of "advancement"? A blink in the lifespan of humanity, but dooms everyone to a hyper-competitive death drive towards an unlivable world.
As a society, our understanding of "normal" has narrowed down to the last 80 years of civilization. A normal focused around consumption, which stands to take it all away just as fast.
The techno-optimists never seriously propose any meaningful solution to millions losing their livelyhoods and dignity so Sam Altman can add an extension to his doomsday bunker. They just go along with it as if they'll be invited down to weather the wet-bulb temperature.