The buggy whip endures. Not, of course, as a commonly used piece of equipment to spur on a steed or two on your daily travels, but as a short-hand epithet deployed in conversations about the need to adapt or perish in the face of technological change and innovation.
“It’s really easy to see, in a big breakthrough, that the horse-and-buggy guys are going to go out of business,” said White House AI czar David Sacks at Sen. Dave McCormick’s historic AI and Energy Summit this past July in Pittsburgh. What wasn’t easy to see, said Sacks, was greater access to affordable housing in the suburbs, new jobs for auto workers and mechanics, and wholly new industries like F1.
Sacks’ comment is in line with how the buggy-whip metaphor has traditionally been used, since it was first entered into the common lexicon in the 1960s in a marketing textbook – as reference to one technology (the personal automobile) quickly subsuming another (the horse and buggy).
The record player, the cassette player, the VCR, the camcorder, the handheld radio, and the dashboard GPS system – buggy whips, all of them, as the home computer and the cell phone consolidated many individual components of consumer technology.
But there’s a problem with this metaphor, which stands on a surprisingly soft foundation of a just-so story about rapid change from horse to car, on two accounts – it ignores both the ongoing change in transportation more broadly (by not giving proper account to the mass adoption of passenger boating and rail in the late 1800s) and just why it was that the automotive industry was built up in Michigan and the Midwest in the early 1900s.
If artificial intelligence is truly going to be deployed at scale, it will be through adoption by everyday Americans and the industries they work in, demonstrating that technology can solve problems in the real world, overcoming the many frictions of daily life in key industries. And as Pennsylvania finds itself at the center of the data center construction boom, it’s worth re-examining the history of Detroit and the auto industry.
Hellbound and Down 