The US government in 1962 regarded the project as a major threat due to the “tremendous increments in economic productivity” which could disrupt the world market. Arthur Schlesinger Jr, historian and special assistant to President Kennedy, described “an all out Soviet commitment to cybernetics” as providing the Soviet Union a “tremendous advantage” in respect to production technology, complex of industries, feedback control and self-teaching computers.
My go to example for “we should have let them cook” is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS