All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone. Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.

Honestly if we went back to horses but had good public transportation as well (buses, trains, airports) it could be pretty sweet

I know most people don’t agree with that but it seems nice to me

Yeah but the transition is rough. For example when we have autonomous vehicles what are all those drivers going to do. You might saw "tough luck" but we are a society not just an economy.

> All of those things also resulted in the massive increase in the quality of life for everyone.

Yes, everyone has a modern smartphone now. Cool, thanks. But last time I checked, can't pay my rent with a smartphone when I'm out of a job.

> Nobody will suggest we ban cars and go back to horse and buggies so cowboys can have jobs.

Maybe not that, but have you looked at sustainable farming movements? In farming, there is a growing movement believing that the way we do farming - basically, ever larger and larger central operations running farms with tens if not hundreds of thousands of animals or acres upon acres of monoculture crops - is no longer sustainable, as the externalities get too serious to be able to ignore:

Biodiversity loss, land erosion (when everything is just the same crop from horizon to horizon and no bushes, wind and rain has an easy time carrying away soil after harvest), an increasing vulnerability to all kinds of pests...

But in order to get smaller, you need people again, because a tractor costing half a million dollars won't ever make the money back on a small farm.