Is AI Another Horseless Carriage?

When the first horseless carriages appeared, many citizens were not pleased with the noisy contraptions that frightened horses and mules, ironically.  Some governments actually went as far as to pass laws that discouraged their use.

One city went as far as to pass a law that required a man carrying a flag on a pole to walk one hundred feet ahead to warn people of its approach.

Then, the aggravations changed to fears, with widespread predictions of losses of jobs, environmental impacts and a world just moving far too fast.

History is full of moments that changed everything: the printing press, the steam engine, the internet.  Among the most fascinating of these are two revolutions separated by over a century—the rise of the horseless carriage, and today, the emergence of artificial intelligence, better known as….AI.

At first glance, they seem worlds apart.  One is a machine of bolts and gasoline; the other, a digital brain.  But look deeper, and you’ll see they share something powerful: the ability to transform society, reshape economies, and redefine what it means to be human.

The Horseless Carriage: Disruption on Wheels

When the first cars appeared in the late 1800s, they were noisy, unreliable, and mocked by many as toys for the rich.  Few believed they would ever replace the horse.

But within a few decades, cities had paved roads, gas stations replaced watering troughs, and carriage-makers became auto mechanics or disappeared altogether.  When the newfangled first automobiles appeared in America many citizens were not pleased with those noisy contraptions that frightened horses and mules. But, entire industries—oil, steel, rubber, road construction, and suburban real estate—boomed.  Others, like buggy whip manufacturers and farriers, saw sharp decline.

The impact was enormous:

·        The workforce shifted, demanding new skills.

·        Urban design changed, creating suburbs and highways.

·        Time and distance shrank, giving birth to weekend travel and the daily commute.

The car didn’t just move people—it moved culture, commerce, and imagination.

AI: The Invisible Engine of the Digital Age

Now, over 100 years later, AI is being met with similar skepticism and excitement. Like the first automobiles, today’s AI systems can seem clunky or overly hyped. But they’re already transforming everything from customer service to creative writing, from supply chains to surgery. And just like the car, AI is both a job-creator and a job-destroyer.

AI’s impact is different in form, but similar in magnitude:

• It redefines work, automating tasks while creating demand for new kinds of digital fluency.

• It reshapes decision-making, helping doctors diagnose faster, marketers personalize deeper, and businesses predict more accurately.

• It challenges ethics, from data privacy to algorithmic bias and intellectual ownership.

Where cars changed how we moved, AI is changing how we think, decide, and create.

Similar Disruptions, New Questions

Both revolutions triggered disruption, fear, and wonder. But AI raises even deeper philosophical questions:

•  Who owns the work AI creates?

• Should machines make life-altering decisions?

• What happens when AI outpaces human abilities in key domains?

The car may have changed the shape of cities, but AI might change the shape of consciousness, creativity, and even identity.

Technology Fears As Reported By The Media in 2001

About Writing:  As great a philosopher as he was, Socrates had his moments of idiocy too. He was not big on actually committing ideas to paper, for example, because he thought it would result in peoples’ memories getting worse. In his own words, “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Thank the stars nobody listened to the old coot, because if I had to orally recite every blog post, I’d be crazier than he was.

About Books & the Printing Press: Conrad Gessner, a Swiss biologist in the 16th century, really didn’t like the invention of the printing press because, he felt, it would lead to information overload. He urged various monarchs to regulate the trade, so the public wouldn’t have to suffer with the “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” Hmm, where have we heard that before (or since, rather)?

About Electricity: When electricity started arriving on the scene in the 19th century, many people were too afraid to use it. U.S. President Benjamin Harrison was apparently one of them. Harrison reportedly had White House staff turn the lights on and off because he was scared of getting electrocuted. Similarly, the general public also feared electric doorbells when they were first rolled out. Imagine how shocked they’d be at electricity’s ubiquity now. Okay, that was a bad pun. Scary bad.

About Radio: In 1936, music magazine Gramophone lamented the arrival of radio for many of the same reasons that reading and writing were attacked. Ironically, the magazine didn’t like radio because it diminished those two activities, which by the 20th century were seen not as scourges of society, but rather as generally good things to do.

Radio had a a habit of enthralling kids to the point that “they have developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker,” the magazine wrote. Even better: “At night the children often lie awake in bed restless and fearful or wake up screaming as a result of

nightmares brought on by mystery stories.” The same has essentially been said for just about every new technology to come along, from video games to the Internet to texting.

About Email:

You’d think a CNN article about email hurting the IQ “more than pot” might be something from the early 1990s, but nope, it was published in 2005.  I’m not an expert on proper scientific method, but the study that the story was based on appears to have more holes in it than Hotmail’s spam filter. The best part are the quotes decrying the bad effects of email from some guy at HP. You know, Hewlett-Packard—the company that makes a ton of money from selling devices that people use to print stuff out… on paper.

All of this is just more evidence that when it comes to spreading fear and ignorance about new technologies, there are no corners that the media and some supposedly smart people won’t cut.  And today’s media has even more channels and ears to broadcast those fears.

A More Current Snapshot

The US’s second-largest employer just dropped the hammer. In a new memo to his 1.5M+ employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed that the company will likely see some job cuts in the near future as generative AI floods “virtually every corner of the company.”

But it’s not as grim as it sounds: Jassy said that while some positions are bound to be automated, other types of jobs will open up.  Some of the best ways to prepare: “Be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms.”

A new Gallup poll suggests many of us are already well on our way: About 40% of American employees have used AI at least a few times in the past year, up from just 21% the year before. Meanwhile, nearly one in five employees count themselves as frequent AI users, relying on LLMs at least a few times a week for work. (A new Microsoft report has some tips to help ease the transition.)

What it means: In the past few months, we’ve finally seen CEOs be more upfront about AI’s impact on jobs. While that transparency can be daunting, it’s also an exciting time for the workforce. We have an active role in reshaping our daily workflows and can proactively create the jobs we envision

Conclusion: We’ve Been Here Before—Sort Of

If history teaches us anything, it’s that technology always comes with trade-offs. The horseless carriage brought mobility and prosperity—but also pollution, traffic, and new inequalities. AI promises efficiency, insight, and breakthroughs—but also bias, dislocation, and dependency.

The key difference? The car moved us faster. AI may make us faster—or obsolete, if we’re not careful.  Both are revolutions. Change is inevitable, so, get off your horse.

Cambiara Group – June 2025