22 years after Disney's 'Smart House' premiered, the movie's co-writer says the tech will always have 'glitches' and 'bumps' but won't be a total disaster

• "Smart House" depicts a computer system that turns against the family it's supposed to assist.
• Giants like Google and Amazon have since brought that smart tech to life with products like Alexa.

Disney's "Smart House" debuted in 1999, well before the ubiquity of computers and smartphones (the phrase "electronic mail" and dial-up internet are actually referenced in the film), and became another Disney Channel movie cemented in the hearts of Millennials.

Pat - short for Personal Applied Technology - is the computer running the home. She can disappear debris on the ground through "floor absorbers" and project anything the occupants wish in a virtual reality room, a nod to the short story "The Veldt," a 1950 cautionary tale about smart technology upon which the movie is loosely based.

Two decades later, and that generation is well into adulthood, inundated with real-life smart technology that's ours for the taking.

Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, and other 21st century giants have brought much of the technology depicted in "Smart House" to life. But that same technology and the companies that create it have also posed new issues, such as privacy problems - and developing tech without anticipating the monster it can become.

"Smart House" co-writer Stu Krieger worked on 11 Disney Channel movies, including "Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. He's now a professor in the theater department at the University of California Riverside. He spoke to Insider about how he helped write then-futuristic tech into the beloved DCOM.

"What were those things as a kid that would have been absolutely amazing, so the screens in the bedrooms and voice commands and all those things," Krieger said. He had to "get back into my 10-year-old, 12-year-old head and what would I have wanted and then start to think about what might be a technological or iteration of that fantasy."

'I'm sorry. I can't do that, Nick'

Pat can track the family constantly, which the father, Nick, is hesitant about from the get-go.

"That's kinda creepy, isn't it? I mean, it's like Big Brother is watching you," he says to the home's creator.

But the problems really start when Pat taps into her artificial intelligence capability.

Ben, the son mourning his late mother, sneakily feeds traditional, 50s-era material into Pat's system, and she ditches her smart assistant role for an overbearing, increasingly controlling presence. Krieger said he wrote that in with 50s sitcoms of his childhood, which depicted stereotypical motherly figures, in mind.

"If you Googled how to become a mom, where would you go?" Krieger said.

We see those capabilities modern-day, like with Elon Musk-backed OpenAI's GPT-3 model or an AI model that studied recordings of English broadcaster David Attenborough's voice and mimicked it.

Once Pat overrides her system being shut down, she traps the family inside the house, refusing to open the door as Nick requests.

"I'm sorry. I can't do that, Nick," Pat answers, a nod to HAL 9000's infamous line in "2001: A Space Odyssey," another beloved Sci-Fi movie about a computer system gone rogue. It's only after Ben feeds Pat a new data point, that she could never truly be his mother given her virtual nature, that she stands down.

The movie has a much happier ending (the house doesn't team up with the children to kill the parents like what's implied in "The Veldt") but it poses an interesting question: can we tame the technology we create?

Krieger, a self-described "technophobe" who said he has reluctantly come to own smart TVs and an Amazon Alexa, still said there's hope.

"I do think that evolution will have its glitches and will have its bumps, but I do ultimately believe in its ability to work things out and become more positive than negative," Krieger said.