The Desk Set

Saw The Desk Set (thanks, Anne!) It was a goofy but prescient film about a quartet of women who work the reference desk at a TV studio. All day long they answer convoluted questions about average rainfall and family members of fictional characters. One day an absent-minded professor shows up to replace them all with a diabolical computing engine (which is so advanced, it only takes up one room!) There's also some kind of romance going on between Ms Watson, who is the head of the department, the professor, and some jerk kind of a guy in administration, but this is less interesting to me.

This film was very ahead of its time in terms of what computers could actually do. They talk about a computer that replaced much of payroll, but I imagine payroll to be mostly filing and applying complex tax codes, both easy jobs for a computer, provided the tax code is rigorous enough. These reference desk women however must understand complex relationships between data. Finding out the weight of the Earth (the climactic final question in the film) only requires a lookup in a physics book. Finding out who the most long-lived fictional character is rather more difficult, but we clever humans know that the question-asker is probably after Methuselah. This crossword-style intelligence is tremendously difficult for computers (but of course they're working on it)

But here we are now anyway, with computers replacing more and more jobs every year. This film boasts the cooperation of IBM, so we can't come to some 'fuck the machines'-style conclusion. Instead it's revealed that the machine is only there to save the women the trouble of looking things up themselves. With its aid, they'll be able to answer more questions than ever before! Ah yes, but that means some other cluster of out-of-work reference librarians will have to find a job elsewhere. I feel like we simply have to come to terms with people being useless. Currently useless people are treated as wastes of space and resources. This is bad thinking because no matter what a genius you are at filing, any computer is already better. The same can be said of chess. I like the idea a basic universal income, but I don't really understand economics, I just kill jobs for my profession.

Anyway, this film does not deal with (what I feel to be) the central problem of people who have become useless through no fault of their own and wastes a lot of time on a romance. Ms Watson is played by Katharine Hepburn who is so majestic and commanding, but delivers lines that seem much more suited to a mousy little woman. The absent-minded professor, meanwhile, is trying to break up her relationship with a smarmy suit who takes her for granted. The suit is seriously courting her by the end though, and will have gobs of cash. The lets us make the argument ourselves that Ms Watson and the prof will be happier because they're intellectual equals, but it never really presents this argument. She seems much smarter than him, actually. But then again, crossword-style smarts are much more casually impressive than narrow, academic study, so who knows.

A good film, entertaining in its ideas but a bit side-tracked by a romance which I could not care less about.