Hollywood once tried to stop the technology that would enrich it. Today's campaign against data centers risks repeating the same costly mistake.

In 1982, Hollywood’s most powerful lobbyist issued one of the worst technological predictions in modern history.

“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone,” — Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti, to Congress.

The film industry was terrified of home video recorders. Consumers could tape television programs, skip commercials, copy movies and lend recordings to their friends. It was like a horror movie Hollywood couldn’t escape. Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued Sony, seeking to hold the manufacturer responsible for copyright violations committed by people using its Betamax machines.

Hollywood was not entirely wrong. VCRs could and would be used for piracy. They disrupted television advertising and weakened the studios’ control over when and where people watched movies.

Hollywood correctly identified the disruption…and completely misunderstood what it would produce.

The VCR did not strangle the film industry. It created the home-video industry. Rental stores appeared across America. Studios discovered they could sell movies after their theatrical runs, revive old titles and earn revenue from films buried in their vaults. By the 1990s, home-video rentals and sales had become one of Hollywood’s most important sources of income.

The machine Hollywood tried to stop became one of its greatest business partners.

Which is why the current panic over artificial intelligence and data centers feels uncomfortably familiar.

Data centers use considerable electricity and sometimes large amounts of water, it’s true. Bad development agreements can force residential ratepayers to help finance infrastructure for some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Indefinite tax exemptions deserve scrutiny. Those are legitimate concerns.

But concern is turning into something broader. Data centers are increasingly described as an invading menace that will drain lakes, pave farms and devour the electrical grid. Politicians who recently welcomed AI investment are competing to demonstrate who dislikes it most.

In Wisconsin, Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany has branded Democratic nominee David Crowley “Data Center David.” Crowley has responded by portraying Tiffany as Big Tech’s real accomplice. Yet neither supports a statewide moratorium. Both recognize that data centers can produce construction employment, municipal tax revenue and investment.

They also understand something their campaign rhetoric conceals: America cannot lead the AI revolution without building the infrastructure AI requires.

President Trump made that point during his White House address to technology and financial leaders this week. He described AI, digital assets and emerging financial technologies as components of an international competition America cannot afford to lose. China will not pause its development because Americans are frightened by power lines or because a zoning hearing ran late.

Trump later acknowledged that data centers “could use a little public relations help.” They need more than public relations. Companies must pay the costs their projects impose on the grid. Negotiations should be public, tax incentives should be limited and communities should receive identifiable benefits.

But regulating construction is different from stopping it.

The strongest argument against today’s technological fatalism comes from economist Julian Simon. Simon recognized that scarcity is not merely a sentence condemning humanity to higher prices. It is a signal that summons investment and innovation. Expensive energy encourages new generation. Costly computing encourages more efficient chips and smaller models.

Stanford researchers found that the cost of obtaining roughly GPT-3.5-level performance fell more than 280-fold in less than two years. No central planner ordered that improvement. Engineers and entrepreneurs produced it.

Even so, no one knows where AI will lead. It may eliminate some occupations and create others that have not yet been named. It may transform medicine, manufacturing and education. It will almost certainly produce failures, abuses and unintended consequences.

The people most confident that they can predict those consequences should remember Hollywood’s abject panic over the VCR.

Opponents saw copyright infringement but not Blockbuster Video. They saw people recording movies from television but not families buying shelves of Disney tapes. They could measure what the technology threatened because the existing system was visible. They could not measure what it might create because it did not exist yet.

That is the central difficulty of emerging technology. It changes the conditions under which every forecast was made. Once people can use it, they adapt it to purposes its inventors, investors and regulators never imagined.

Some experts will be right about AI’s dangers. But even when they are right, they may be profoundly wrong about the final result. Hollywood correctly predicted that the VCR would disrupt its business. It failed to understand that the disruption would make the business larger.

No one — no one — can know how AI will reshape the world surrounding it. Government can punish fraud, protect ratepayers and require companies to bear their costs. What it cannot do is stand outside history, foresee every outcome and decide which inventions humanity will be permitted to explore.

Trying to play God with technological progress is foolishness. The future has a persistent habit of defying the people who claim to know it best.

No one can predict how an emerging technology will disrupt the systems around it. Trying to play God by stopping innovation may only prevent us from discovering what it can become.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)