The Twonky and AI

Hans Conried was a fine comedic actor. And though somehow I always thought he spoke with a Viennese accent, he was really born in Baltimore, but to a Viennese immigré. So maybe I heard something in his voice, or perhaps he played Viennese men and used his father’s accent. I don’t know. But he played the lead in the 1953 light sci-fi comedy The Twonky. Conried played Kerry West, a philosophy professor at a small college whose wife, Carolyn, has to leave town to care for her sister for a couple of weeks and orders a television set to keep her husband company. "Twonky" was a word that the college's eccentric football coach, Coach Trout, used to call, as he put it, anything that you don’t know what it is. And the television was not a TV but a twonky. It didn’t show any TV shows, didn’t need the roof antenna connected, and didn’t even need to be plugged in, but could project an electric beam from its screen to light your cigarette (but throw your pipe away), smash your coffee cup from your hand before you could sip it, levitate things, do the dishes, comb and shave its master, shine his shoes; and, shaped like a tall end table, toddle on its four legs, speak with voice of E.T., and even drive a car.

It could also zap you in your forehead to pacify you and, as Coach Trout put it, “eliminate that which the twonky doesn’t want you to think, and to put ideas into your head, too. Those words, ‘I haave nooo complaint,’ that was the twonky talking.”

Conried’s West didn’t like the intrusive oppression of his new robot valet. But it really is a light-hearted movie that’s entertaining, as well as a pleasant soporific if watched in bed. There is no death or destruction; though there is a car chase scene with an old British lady who believes that because the US was once a British colony she is allowed to drive on the left side of the road, and otherwise declaring proudly, “It’s my God-given right to be wrong”; and though the beautiful Lady Bill Collector played by Gloria Blondell (who got second billing in the credits) did get her clothes burned off so that she had to run naked into the street, but it was all off-screen. So SFW.

The reason I write all this is that this seems to be, at least in part, what AI is doing in a small way right now. Coach Trout realizes the nature of the danger to humanity posed by the twonky in what it is in one of the few serious scenes of the movie, transcribed below.

***

Coach Trout: I understand this twonky now. I’ve been telephoning my scientific friends; they tell me they already have robots in this world of ours. The only trouble is a super-atomic brain like that one down there, one that can think, reason, make its own choices, disguise itself, it can wriggle around under its own power – they tell me that the boys of science are centuries away from that.

Kerry West: Then it is from another world.

Coach Trout: No. From our world, centuries in the future.

Kerry West: What the devil are you talking about?!

Coach Trout: I’m telling you, one of these robots, one of these twiddling twonkies of the future time, has fallen though its own dimensional time into ours.

Kerry West: Fallen through time?!

Coach Trout: Don’t you read science fiction? Our universe is curved. Einstein proved that. Well now if our universe is curved, then so is time. [Pointing to the circular edge of a tea saucer.] This is the past, the present and the future. It fell from here to here.

West: But it’s only a television set.

Coach Trout: The form of a television set. I mean that. When it fell out of its dimension in time into ours, it fell into a television production factory line or into that television shop. With that super intelligence it knew at once where it was and the danger to it, so it immediately changed its form; into a form that we would understand, a form that would be quite safe and acceptable. Who knows what it looks like. Strange cars and conveyance. Horrible plastic flesh, synthetic blood. Woo.

West: Why me? Why did it have to pick on me?

Coach Trout: I believe that in a world in the future where this twonky comes from, every house, every family has a twonky of its own to carry out the dictates of the super state. Yup, yes, the super state. He’s a secret detective. But he’s not secret, there’s one placed in every home to serve, to regulate every thought, according to the dictates of the super state. He’s now carrying out that function with you.

West: We’ve got to get rid of it, smash it to pieces.

AND

Trout: Those words, ‘I haave nooo complaint,’ that was the twonky talking.

West: We talked. It came out of the loudspeaker.

Trout: What?

West: Yes, it just said something about a robot or something, an experimental model.

Trout: Experimental model. Then we must eliminate it at once. If it’s an experimental model perhaps there is only one. Eliminate it, and we can change the future.

West: I’ll call he police.

Trout: No, no. Not the authorities. Do you want the twonky to come up here in the form of a policeman? Yeah, why not? He changed his form once, he could do it again. To Boris Karloff, or Santy Clause, or even Satan himself. We must neutralize it while it’s in that television form right down in there now. We must think. Eh. What would Knute Rockne do at a time like this?

West: I told Carolyn not to buy anything on the installment plan.

***

Eventually West realizes: Yes, you’re right, it’s your God-given right to be wrong!

Ultimately, this movie was about sterilizing society from the madness of Man, or even sterilizing Man from his own madness. And it was clear to me that it was the inspiration for Terminators One and Two, right down to mankind’s madness being the problem, and the shape-shifting liquid policeman (sort of).

Next week, a review of Harvey as an exploration of the complacency of humanity in its own affluence and ease, while delving into the compartmentalization of theories of mental health and misuse of American psychiatric care, and challenging that popular perception that pookas are fiction.