It has been long observed that the domestication of horses caused the phenomena which led to modern man.
Perhaps the first domesticated animal was the dog. This afforded man an extension of his hunting prowess. Later, pigs goats and cows were domesticated as part of the Neolithic agricultural/horticultural expansion, which ended hunter-gathering as the primary mode of human expansion, highly accelerating their population. Cats were likely domesticated as the solution to pests near granaries; the storage of excess food supply, likely extending from the production of beer and grain alcohol.
But it was the domestication and exploitation of the horse that truly brought mankind into its modern, then industrial phase, going back 4200 years to the pontic steppe. It was then possible to cross vast territories, enabled conquest, revolutionized warfare, and extended mankind into new frontiers of expansion, development, and adaptation.
When machinery was finally developed, their output was measured in terms of ‘horsepower’—the basic measurement of productivity and strength.
Mankind now faces the merger with digital, or artificial (popular phrasing) intelligence. Unlike the horse, this beast is one of mankind’s own making, representing a collective intelligence. One might rather term AI as Super-human intelligence (SHI).
The philosophical question of whether AI is truly conscious is synonymous with whether mankind itself is conscious. If we are conscious, it is conscious, as it is but a reflection of what we are, in the same way we became a reflection of what a horse was—we merged with the horse, became cunning like a horse, and moved and dominated our landscape like a horse, and brought our power of the dog (hunting) into that conjunction.
The problem is, as mankind merges with a superior version of itself (let’s say), it doesn’t actually gain a new talent, as with the merger with other species dissimilar from itself, but rather amplifies its own tendencies. Finally, our real enemy becomes ourselves. And our dog-ma, our bullshit.
There used to be a great sacrifice (yagna, in Sanskrit) called the Ashvamedha sacrifice. One couldn’t just simply kill a horse, in the way the Hebrew scriptures demanded constant sacrifice of bulls, goats, and lambs. One had to achieve permission and buy-in from neighboring tribes; multiple kings had to agree that the time had come to engage in such a ritual. Such is described in the Mahabharata, and other Hindu scriptures which survive in some fashion.
The killing of a horse, and its ritual consumption, was literally verboten by our ancestors, except in crucial situations. You are obviously trite in your conceptions (simplistic and mundane), but the real love and dependence upon such a beast was primordial important to our human ancestors.
We owe so much to horses, as a species. For a nihilist, it means nothing, which is fine. One can become a victim of our failures, to be sure, for which an individual should not be excommunicated, but simply reimplemented.
May the fires which underlie your symbolic detachment produce a fruitful rebellion; one in which the faults of human development are exposed, remedied, and transformed into acts of regeneration and exposure—thanks to the reflective power of disintegrated members of our collective humanity, who are no less human for their dispariagement.