You’ve probably smirked at the old cartoons. A sputtering, smoking automobile rattles down a dusty road, and a farmer on a horse yells, ‘Get a horse!’ It’s a classic punchline—proof that the skeptics of the past were just too stubborn to see the future.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: they were right. The early automobiles were objectively terrible. They broke down constantly. They were loud, dangerous, and unreliable. A horse could do most things a car could do—and often better. The skeptics weren’t idiots; they were rational people looking at the evidence in front of them.
I read a 2017 article from the Saturday Evening Post that dug into this history. It described how newspapers mocked cars, how towns passed laws against them, how doctors warned of ‘automobile face’ (a made-up condition). Sound familiar? Swap ‘automobile’ for ‘AI’ or ‘electric scooter’ or ‘cryptocurrency’, and you’ve got the same pattern. Every transformative technology is initially judged by the standards of the incumbent it replaces.
That’s the Mimeng Principle at work: the first car was a ‘worse horse’ because ‘horse’ was the default mental model. The skeptics were accurately describing the present, not the future. They saw the flaws—the dust, the breakdowns, the lack of infrastructure—and they were correct. But they missed the systemic build-out: the roads, the fuel stations, the regulations, the cultural shift that made the car inevitable.
So what does this mean for us today? When you hear someone dismiss a new technology—’That’ll never work,’ ‘It’s too expensive,’ ‘Nobody needs that’—pause. Are they wrong? Maybe not. But they might be stuck in the wrong time frame. The skeptics were right about the car in 1900. They were wrong about the car in 1950.
The real question isn’t whether the technology is perfect now. It’s whether we’re building the roads—or just yelling at the cars. The next time you feel that smug superiority about the ‘get a horse’ crowd, remember: you’re probably the farmer in someone else’s cartoon.
FAQ
Q: What question would a skeptic ask?
A: Why should I believe that today's flawed technology will eventually succeed, when so many others failed? The answer: not all succeed, but the ones that do often look like failures at first. The key is to distinguish between temporary flaws and fundamental limitations.
Q: What's the practical implication?
A: Stop dismissing new technologies based on their current shortcomings. Instead, ask: Is there a path to infrastructure, regulation, and cultural acceptance that could turn this into a dominant system? That's the difference between a 'worse horse' and a future car.
Q: What's the contrarian take?
A: The contrarian take is that we should actually listen to the skeptics more carefully. They often point out genuine flaws that need to be fixed. The mistake is not their criticism—it's their conclusion that the technology will never improve. The wise approach is to embrace the criticism while betting on the long-term systemic shift.