I know this is a rough metaphor, but I doubt the tycoons shaping the future would be any gentler in practice.
In the United States, after the post-war rise, the trend shows a long, gradual decline. This is followed by a sharp rebound around the early 2000s, and then another drop. As horses disappeared from productive labor, they briefly found a second life as leisure and entertainment. That phase, however, did not last very long either.
The picture is even worse in China, where the decline has been almost continuous since the mid-1970s.
These are just two representative countries, but I suspect the broader pattern elsewhere is not fundamentally different.
Guys, try to make yourselves entertaining — it may be the only thing that secures your future health insurance.
Horse population data are from FAOSTAT (the US rebound may partly reflect methodological changes, but the broad pattern remains), and human population data are from the World Bank. The figure was generated using Python.