It’s an apt comparison.

The industrial revolution crippled long-established sustainable practices and forced people to move into cities with miserable conditions and perform inhuman labor that maimed and disfigured them for life, with all of the profits going to the already-obscenely-wealthy.

It also supercharged colonization, and pollution… there are a lot of parallels here.

And then you’ve got the enclosure acts, which are analogous to how AI companies took our digital commons and privatized it to sell it back to us.

Also, alternative article without paywall: https://gizmodo.com/graduation-speaker-says-ai-is-the-next-industrial-revolution-immediately-drowned-out-by-booing-students-2000757140

And video of the section of the speech: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JSTdbu8u9oc