I actually think that's a great comparison but not for the reasons you're making it.

I live in NYC. When the automobile started to get popular the city saw it as the future and went to extreme lengths to accommodate it. Bulldozed houses, split neighborhoods in half to accommodate parkways and highways that formed our inevitable future. Turns out, cars don't scale. Eventually folks did push back and some of the proposed projects never happened[1] but we're still suffering the consequences the ones that did to this day.

Had there been more criticism and more discussion at the outset we might have avoided a lot of problems. I don't think the choice was "cars or horses", it was "how do we implement this new technology?". Trains and trams, it turns out, would have been better. But the automative industry was rich and powerful and persuaded cities to rip up their streetcar tracks. Many parallels to today's AI industry.

[1] https://www.mcny.org/story/cross-manhattan-expressway

> “virtually everyone believed that the private car was the greatest invention since fire or the wheel. Public transportation seemed to be nothing more than a relic of the past.” Wide modern expressways, Moses believed, would save New York as a great city.