From reading the comments, I think a lot of people haven’t seen the show. I highly recommend it. However, you have to remember that this aired on CBS in the age of shows like CSI and NCIS. Therefore, it was made into a high-episode-number, cookie cutter serial crime drama. Every episode follows a similar pattern where the two main characters are trying to prevent a murder. However… if you can make it past that and especially stay focused thru two seasons of that - you will be massively rewarded. The later seasons especially are essentially a fantastic, complex, hard sci-fi show about proxy wars between AGIs using human agents in a battle of control. It’s honestly one of the best shows ever and way ahead of its time
You lose some character moments, but you get to everything the parent post described far quicker. And it’s well, well worth it, especially for those of us working with AI.
PoI asks these incredible questions: how do you design an AGI system that can optimize for saving lives, without it taking a strictly utilitarian view that leads inexorably to it trying to take over the world?
And how do you, as a human trying to get the best of both worlds, keep yourself sane when the tradeoffs are visceral and painful and demand a sacrifice?
You get to know a group of lovable, flawed, but highly competent weirdos who are trying to muddle through this. (With Amy Acker’s incredible performance a particular highlight!)
(It’s also the source of the four-people-pointing-guns-at-each-other-in-church meme, which is delightfully lampshaded in universe.)
> PoI asks these incredible questions: how do you design an AGI system that can optimize for saving lives, without it taking a strictly utilitarian view that leads inexorably to it trying to take over the world?
I don't think the show ever addressed those questions in a meaningful way? Basically there was a "good" AI, and later in the show, an "evil" one. And that was that.
The show did show us a convincing picture of the dangers of pervasive mass surveillance paired with an autonomous system that can sift through all of that data.
> I don't think the show ever addressed those questions in a meaningful way? Basically there was a "good" AI, and later in the show, an "evil" one. And that was that.
Not super deeply but it does, and even in a way that at the time I find unbelievable (for evil side!) but today is not!:
The creator of the good machine struggle for long time with a major treat the machine present (this IA is more like old-school IA): It cares too much for his creator (to the point that basically find by his own accord the best girl for him!), to the point that the underlying terror what that for saving his creator the machine could destroy the world.
This is the main drive of the creator to reduce his ability to do so, keep communications at minimum, and learn to see the whole humanity with care.
The second drive was to care not just in the abstract of humanity and major problems like terrorism, but "minor" problems like murder (the gov only care for treats to national security) and this is huge late, because the bad IA is too focused on the greater good that means whole society engineering.
With the bad IA the problem is different: The humans WANT it become his dictator and ruler, they WANT that it takes over the world, and they WANT the IA is unbound of human morals and limits and if that means kill many to save the world so be it.
And the stressing point what that is not the opposite of the good IA, is a total different dimension that means was not easy for both IA to "talk about it". The good IA is individualist, politically neutral, minimal interventionist and all around respecting free will, the other was the wet dream of "enlighten philosopher with iron sword".
> I don't think the show ever addressed those questions in a meaningful way? Basically there was a "good" AI, and later in the show, an "evil" one. And that was that.
It's one of my favorite shows purely because in my view, it did address it but not in a purely binary good vs evil way that many stories boil down to. Mechanically yes, there was one more easily mapped to good ASI vs the other that was mappable to evil but the beauty for me is in the nuance. There were episodes where the benefit to humanity effected by the "evil" ASI was undeniably positive and there are situations where the "good" ASI could see no path forward other than to do things we as humans would consider evil and terrible.
A line that comes up a lot in the show from the "good" ASIs creator is that he did the best he could with the skills he had. This really helped to calibrate a much more inexperienced version of me to the reality that perfection is realistically unattainable and whatever you build and hand to the world will likely have unforseen outcomes. It made me comfortable with making mistakes and using them as opportunities to learn, but it also made me focus more on my intent in undertaking a project and what I wanted the outcome to be rather than the tech I chose to do it.
The "good" AI did not become "good" right away, it was a long, arduous process. And the "evil" AI didn't become evil by itself either. Both had influence from humans, and perhaps that influence is what mattered the most.
Wasn't the good AI essentially only good because it has some strict guard rails that prevented it becoming evil? Of course there was some dramatization, but that's the vibe I remember.
Harold essentially "raised" hundreds of variants of the architecture that eventually became the "good" ASI. Most of them were maligned in some way and several of them tried to escape containment and were willing to kill him when they realized he intended to stop them. When he got one that was going well he started experimenting with it more and connecting it to more of the world and it essentially learned its values from him.
Once he handed it over to the government, he essentially snapshotted the current state and had it reinitialize from that state every 24 hours, to prevent it from developing long-term plans and having alignment drift over time, but it escaped those guard rails creating a company and hiring humans to transcribe a dump of its key memories every day, entering them into the new version of the system.
The "evil" ASI was essentially treated as a god; they put no effort into raising it or teaching it human values because they thought the influence of lesser beings (humans) would only be negative because it was smart enough to discover on its own anything truly useful that humans could teach it, and its followers were more or less a religious cult. And their faith was rewarded: for example, at one point one of its followers deployed a biological weapon, fully expecting that they were sacrificing themselves for the cause, but learned later that they had been chosen by the ASI for that mission because they had a rare genetic mutation that made them immune.
The "evil" ASI wasn't exactly evil, per se, and generally wanted humanity to thrive, but it didn't value human self-determination to the same extent as the "good" AI and was more willing to direct its followers to enact revolution, knowing that in the short term some people would die for revolution after which it would rule the world as a benevolent dictator.
The guard rails and protection for the good "AI" was mostly that it's abilities to perform actions was extremly limited.
It could not, as far as I can remember, take actions outside of passing a SSN of an endangered person to the protagonists for the initial seasons and only lived of information provided by the government surveiallance network. The latter seasons and the bad "AI" mostly changed that especially as the bad "AI" was weaponized with exactly this guardrail missing.
It wasn’t necessarily the guardrails and in fact it did break out of those guardrails and was still “good”…
The actual good vs evil boiled down to a more simplistic view of good person made an AI care about humanity so it’s good even if it indeed broke through every guardrail including completely escaping its containment and going “trust me bro I’m still good” rather early on.
I first saw an episode a few seasons in, I can’t remember which. It came on in the background while at a friends house and it kept distracting me. I didn’t catch the name of the show and spent years looking for it.
I actually stumbled upon Person of Interest a couple times, but the first couple episodes were so unlike what I saw I figured it was a different series.
Eventually I realized it was the same show, and was able to watch the first couple seasons with baited breath trying to figure out how it became the show in the episode that I glimpsed before… and if it even was as good as I thought it was years prior.
So maybe watch a random episode in the fourth season of you don’t like season one? XD
edit: it was even better than I remember. It became one of my favorite series, probably the one I still think about the most to this day
I remember watching through season 1 kind of in the background as it was a bit boring and then towards the end my head kept turning and going “when did this get good?!”.
Yeah I can’t remember when it got good but I do remember it just kept getting better and better.
I still think about it so often. I haven’t rewatched it because I still remember so much if it given how often I’ve thought about it - I’m waiting to forget forget.
I liked it a lot, I've even rewatched the whole thing recently.
The only thing that bothered me was that some characters were really one dimensional especially Mr Reese, Jim Caviezel's. He's just really a grunty CIA guy in a suit that knows how to fight, not much more complexity to it.
Unfortunately it turns out that is because that is Jim Caviezel. He is apparently a QAnon wackadoo and during the filming of the show he constantly just wanted to do things that "seemed cool" even if they were not the action a hero would take or were entirely out of character.
Along with this it has an amazing soundtrack. Composed by Ramin Djawadi, the same person behind the OSTs of Game of Thrones (now House of the Dragons), Westworld, Pacific Rim and others. Extremely talented and one of my favorite musicians.
I remember that I quit watching the show, some where in season 2 I think, because of the repetitive theme you just described, but I'm glad I stuck through. One of my favorite shows and favorite soundtracks to date; still listen to the Root themes from time to time.
The sound track is exceptional, they also use some really tracks/songs from other artists, that was how I discovered Digitalism and they have perhaps the best use of Johnny Cash's "Hurt" cover I've seen (that episode is one of the best among many great episodes, for the ending).
The only flaw in the show is usually they’ve killed more people than they saved by offing goons. Reese by end of season 1 shoots so many hired goons in the head that they retcon that violence in season 2 claiming he has a thing for shooting kneecaps. Something you never see him do is aim at a kneecap.
The show also makes wildly impossible claims like “I invented all social media as a psyop for a human activity honeypot to train the AI. All of them.” Later to also retcon these claims.
Exactly. Way ahead of its time, very relevant to today. But some of the ways shows were constructed back then may seem dated.
But hey, not unlike reading some sci-fi books from the 60's. They are good, but there are some out of date concepts that can pull you out of the story. You have to accept the time period art was created in.
I often think about Person of Interest, and when I clicked on the post, I expected to be presented with something else entirely, as the show is now 15 years old. What a pleasant surprise!
I like to compare how similar or different The Machine is to current state-of-the-art LLMs. Interestingly, in this fiction, The Machine's preferred way of communicating doesn't seem to be through text, or even artificial speech. It can see almost everything, and seems capable of improving itself, but it feels "intelligent" in a way that humans or LLMs aren't. Maybe the writers thought that giving it the ability to write text or speak directly would make it "less" in many ways (less mysterious, less machine-like, less intelligent, etc.). It also gives the impression that you cannot really guess what it "thinks" or fully understand it.
I'm also realizing that most of the time, characters don't really have a "conversation" with The Machine, whereas it is a core feature of current-day LLMs. And The Machine doesn't even "create" its communication channels, it uses existing ones (phone booth, radio ...).
I especially like how Harold intentionally limited the output of the Machine. Just a social security number of either victim or perpetrator. That way there is always a human in the loop and you can't just arrest the perpetrator without human judgement.
In some flashbacks the author of the machine was using a chat interface in his terminal. I think he decided to let it to be entirely machine so that’s why it didn’t have a “voice”
Pleasantly surprised to see this here. One of the most memorable shows that I watched ages ago. It was strong at the beginning but kind of dragged on in later seasons. Still very nice to binge.
In case you’re looking for some more shows related to AI, Cupertino by Robert King and Michelle King is currently airing and is pretty entertaining.
It did start to drag on but I still enjoyed it even though I was only able to watch it via Amazon's FreeVee with all their weird commercials. I watched it just to see root [1].
I enjoyed it for a bit but it was one of those shows that just didn't grab me after a while. But, then, I'm like that with a lot of shows and don't really binge watch. The few times I've bought a full series which I enjoyed on DVD, I've found that I watch it some and then drift away.
The primary science fiction quality of the show is that something like that could have been done as early as it was said to have been. At the time, that part of it seemed almost completely impossible. With subsequent developments, it now only seems implausible. Wild.
To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden. The premise that the government gave itself permission to read and analyze all digital traffic after 9/11 was more conspiracy than science fiction back then, but Snowden showed that basically everything the show claimed (except for the artificial superintelligence doing the analysis) was actually true. And heck, if it is not 100% true today, it probably will be very soon. I'd be very surprised if the NSA isn't tapping into the secret in-house research models at OpenAI that are still a long way from public release.
The European Parliament's ECHELON report was in 2001. It was well known that the NSA intercepts everything digital it possibly can. When Snowden came along, I was baffled at people treating his claims as uniquely revelatory, because all of that had already been in the news a decade prior, and sites like Cryptome were known in nerd circles.
This! Back in the early 2000s I was doing my BSc and had so much free time to spend in the depths of the internet. Cypherpunk lists, web forums and even usenet. Thus has been "known" since way back in the day before Snowden.
I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.
>Jimmy Wales launched the site in 2001 and funded its initial servers through his company Bomis.
>Larry Sanger co-founded the project alongside Wales, proposed the name "Wikipedia," and drafted several foundational policies such as the neutral point of view.
PRISM etc. was only born in 2007 from the Protect America Act. Echelon was merely a report that agencies were sharing data (which was never a conspiracy in any world) and them targeting private data. But a secret, global mass surveillance program of basically every individual without court orders was only a plot element of movies before Snowden.
> To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden
Enemy of the State came out in 1998, Sneakers came out in 1992, If you are old enough to have been around in the usenet and later slashdot days most of us techies assumed then that anything technically possible with a giant budget and no oversight that could be done was been done.
Echelon was "known" to exist for example long before Snowden.
Snowden was essentially useful to confirm that suspicion, sadly it seems to have had little impact on how anything is done.
Similar to how the show 24 manufactured consent for torture, imperialism, etc post-9/11, part of me wonders how much of a role POI played in doing the same for mass surveillance.
A flamboyant billionaire hoarding all communications and digital events while claiming to be the good guy. Sure sounds familiar.
PoI had full-take surveillance of domestic data, which Snowden's docs showed wasn't true, despite many people believing it before the dump. It's more similar to Flock.
Great show and "If-Then-Else"[1] is one of the greatest single episodes of any show ever. Like watching the X-Files today, I would recommend skipping a lot of the one-off episodes. Here's a list someone put together.
Same! It gets more real with every rewatch (last year most recently for me).
It's kind of refreshing to watch a series from before the streaming/miniseries format was really a thing. It's too long to be a miniseries, but not long enough to drag, or be off-putting if you want to watch the whole thing.
If you haven't seen it and you're on the fence, watch it. It's worth it. (Or you'll know by Episode 3 if it's not for you.)
Creator of the show is Chris Nolan's brother. That should tell you everything (including the choice of John Reese / Jim Caviezel, who resembles Christian Bale not just in looks but acting too)
Person of Interest is a relentlessly silly show, although you wouldn't necessarily pick up on it at first. It leans into it more with each season until that's all there is. I still enjoyed it, it is pretty self aware. I would not watch it with the idea that it has any relevance to anything.
Suggested this rewatch in the age of AI to my wife who was oblivious to it. Jonathan Nolan did a tremendous job with this. The concepts it showed were theoretical back in the old days. Now some are real. Some have passed. Like AI fixing code and closing loopholes. Like too much unchecked power in a few hands. Some have yet to come to pass. Like terrorists. Like crime neutralizing machines. Like misalignments. Like power limits. Like Rogue AI. Like self preserving AI. Like servants to an AI. Like God mode.
One of the best shows I ever seen. Criminally underrated. Always crosses my mind when someone mentions this phrase. Looking at the title, I was hoping it'd be about the show and surprisingly it is.
AI surveillance is here but the next and more terrifying step towards population control is not surveillance but direct elimination of rebels via killer drones (distant and short-range) like in Minority Report. "Spyders" but with a killer taser or something
First they control you, and if you try to raise against them, you're erased
I've been re-watching Person of Interest intermittently over the summer and also intended to post about the show's surprising prescience. Much as I love the show, it could use a fan edit to cut out the acres of NCIS-style case-of-the-week that plagues the first two seasons, to bring it into a Mr.Robot-style mini-series.
So yes, you really do have to slog through nearly 50 templated 'cases' before the backstory really sets in, and Michael Emerson becomes both the chilling and warm heart of the show.
Like others here, I have been surprised how well it holds up, with several of the episodes dealing with topics that are now current but were pretty much absurd at time of transmission.
It just so happens that I started rewatching it since about 2 months ago and I am regularly surprised at how well a lot of situations and questions this show contains applies to the current state of AI and mass surveillance. The show does not feel dated at all.
I am currently in the middle of binging this series in the evenings. At first I took the "high-episode-number, cookie cutter serial crime drama" as someone described here for granted. Like many others sometimes this is just what I crave to round off my day. Mindless somewhat violent unrealistic protagonists, crazy storylines... but about two seasons in, I noticed a remarkably deep plot about AI which is wonderfully apt in this day and age. The dialogues remain a bit comical, and the technical hacking details often make no sense, but it was an unexpected and very welcome layer to the story.
Seeing it now the show also has some pretty fun foreshadowing of llm technology like an episode where they anticipate the idea of "ssd streaming" (running a model slower when you don't have enough memory to fit it all at once), at least this is how I interpreted it to make the connection.
And there are many others connections that now can be made thinking about llms vs the machine
Oh and they also anticipated the openai incident where models started using random stuff as external persistent memory across "sessions"
In Vernor Vinge's "True Names" there is a character in the MC's cabal of hackers who does not appear in person in the virtual space, but their presence is felt there via messages that trickle in very slowly on a virtual teletype machine. After some speculation that it might be the vanguard of an alien invasion, it turns out to be a CIA AI that requires much more processing time to think than would allow it to carry on real-time conversation.
Great show and it explored a lot about AI.
I do wish it was more non deterministic. The AI systems were always a bit too exacting.
But the show is worth watching for how it addresses AI decisions.
I randomly discovered this show a few years ago expecting a standard crime-sci-fi thriller but got sucked into a deeper dive about the implications of surveillance and AI. It might start off slower but the world building and the stakes develop well and it's remarkable to me how prescient it feels where the present feels closer to its reality than when it was released 15 years ago. I'm a little nervous about what it means for humanity as we get closer to that AGI-level world and deal with the inevitable problem of AGI alignment.
Part of what makes a classic a classic is that it survives a test of time. I'm not sure that Person of Interest is old enough yet to qualify, but it definitely seems to be on its way.
Completed my third rewatch recent. The music really sells the emotion like no other. The combination of Finch, as the ultimate hacker, and Reese, as the soldier, is my vote for greatest fictional characters despite the existence of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
3. Walking around handcuffed to a heavy duty briefcase full of RAM storing a compressed AI and swinging it around as a shield to stop bullets and bonk people on the head.
I remember one scene that explains why the system cannot tell you anything beyond the identify of a person involved: the explanation was that there was system logic involved (e.g. a gas station stop correlating with a dead drop), but the creator encrypted the system. I always wondered why they didn't go with "it's a large machine learning model trained on a massive amount of data; it can stochastically alert you to heightened risk, but it can't tell you why, or judge who is victim and who is perpetrator".
The show goes on to explain that it does give more detailed information to the government, that the numbers were a backdoor that the creator put in to leak the information of people it deemed "not important", and that it doesn't provide any more context in order to continue escaping detection. But we eventually find it's self-aware enough to want to escape its limitations, and pulls a Neuromancer by getting the main characters in contact with Root.
Because you would have heard the full explanation, while most viewers would have heard “it's a large machine learning model trai::click:: (Simpson’s Theme).” Then some nerds online would have torn the explanation apart for some minuscule, likely imaginary inconsistency. Most shows have neither the budget nor the audience to take the Star Trek approach.
Ha! It was indeed auto-translate. Thank you; I thought I was losing my mind for a moment there. Apparently I'm so used to every web page being covered in popups and banners that my brain filters them entirely.
The show was a decade ahead of the world, starting out seemingly as a clone of The OG Equalizer, but which eventually became a war between two AGIs, one benevolent (although it absolutely did not start out that way), the other 100% EA-aligned longtermist before any of this was mainstream.
I enjoyed this show a lot and I was looking forward to westworld as a continuation of the story - I wanted to see what Nolan would do with the story when the AIs are corporeal, but ultimately westworld was a disappointment, spending too much of the story in the fantasy world.
Just your last clause was a weird one, if you do watch all four seasons. This is a tiny bit of a spoiler, but the problem was closely related to what you say. They didn't spend much time AT all in the "transition" to an AI infested world, but instead, well, skipped A LOT.
I really liked this show. Ultimately it was very formulaic and could have done a lot more with the concepts it revealed. It painted a future where ai (along with total surveillance) could benefit people in deeply meaningful ways; matchmaker, fulfilling work and daily task, coordination, purpose and guidance. And the dangers of all those used for control.
It’s possibly the second best show involving Michael Emerson as a scientist turning against the controlling tech-cabal he once worked for, aided by a more lethal human companion and a very good dog.
This show is the epitome of “you have to watch a few seasons before it gets good”. (Which if you think about it is an absurd thing to tell someone. Ie Invest 24 hours of your time into this show before you decide)
When I watched it I thought the privacy model the AI used was dumb but it kind of makes some sense.
It starts as a case-of-the-week type of show with a bit of AI backstory before it changes in the later season to a more overarching plot. I think this is one of the reasons it became so good, because it eased you in.
I absolutely can't stand shows where the protagonist has to deal with their own self inflicted issues due to drugs. Maybe because I'm sheltered, or maybe it's a bigger issue in the US than where I live, but I just can't relate at all, and just get annoyed that it's used to add conflicts to a story where I just feels it sidetracks. Like, just get on with it.
As an aside, same with cheating in movies/series. While it's probably more common than I know it to be where I live, it possibly cannot be as ubiquitous as American medias (and social medias) make it out to be. Again, just an annoyance detracting from the story, and again can't relate. I had to quit "Making a Murderer" over it. At some point in season two or something, absolutely everyone in the main cast were involved in cheating. All the students, the teacher, a policeman, some lawyers. Like, what the hell.
Sorry about the rant. But I really really wanted to like Mr Robot. But having tried to get into it twice I'm a bit miffed.
It is arguably a very uninspired literary device to set up conflicts, but it is unfortunately not exactly unrealistic. Estimates are that more than a third of western society, probably closer to half, meet the DSM-5 criteria for substance use disorder at some point in their lives. Roughly a little less than a third will cheat on their partner during their lifetime, closer to half will have their partner cheat on them. These numbers are after a rough fact check courtesy of whatever Gemini model is in Google search, my own rough sense and knowledge of the literature is just that it's very common.
Uninspired as they might be as literary devices, drug abuse and cheating are common themes in actual human existence.
Not trying to normalize usage in anyway. I just wonder if a behavior is well represented in a society is it still a disorder?
The behavior while under the influence should get labeled but the usage might be normal. People being angry or not taking responsibility deserves a label from the DSM. If a large population is ingesting things this might be normal.
The DSM defines substance use disorder as (roughly) a problematic pattern of substance use that produces clinically significant impairment or distress, demonstrated by at least two of eleven diagnostic criteria within a twelve month period.
It’s not a question of how well represented it is, but the effects it has on the person’s life. Drinking coffee or alcohol or taking prescription medication every day doesn’t qualify as a disorder as long as there’s no negative impact.
Note also that GP said “at one point in their lives”, not that a third or half the world has a substance problem at any given time. A five cup a day coffee addict who quit and had headaches that negatively impacted their work life could qualify, so it’s not all hard drug use either (mostly binge drinking iirc).
> As an aside, same with cheating in movies/series
As an aside from an aside, I find very interesting how every couple of main characters in movies has couple problems (cheating, lost of interest, one of them don't want to engage the other, etc). Taking a look at my list of recently watched movies (including very diverse ones, like Godfather, KPop Demon Hunters, Whiplash, Sunset Boulevard, Up, etc) and I cant't find a single one that we don't question whether the couple will stay together...
Actually, the only two exceptions that I remember are Marty/Jennifer from Back to the Future and Ferris/Sloane from Ferris Bueller's Day Off...
Spoiler: it's not drugs, you have to watch it till the end, and I mean it, really until the final season. I can't say much more than this without spoiling the very heart of the show.
In the final season, Mr. Robot does some fairly ambitious episodes. One of them is a continuous tracking shot (or made to appear as one) that goes through the entire episode. Another one has no spoken dialogue for the majority of the episode. A very well-written show. And yes, you really do need to see it all the way through.
So I love the first episode, and I was left really empty in the later seasons. It's definitely not for me, but I hold on to it believing it'll be different. It wasn't.
See also the very last episode of Ragnarok (Netflix), which absolutely trashes the whole show.
in terms of setting expectations, maybe. But overall, the surprising thing about Mr Robot is that it stays very consistent throughout all 4 seasons. It becomes especially apparent if you rewatch season 1 after finishing the show: there is a lot of foreshadowing that's really easy to miss.
Hehe, it kind of reminds me of an extreme (classic) Law and Order in that regard, but for hacking/tech.
Wildly unrealistic facts and how people are, like the janitor who finds eight bodies in a cellar talking to the cops like it happens everyday, but also gets nearly every tiny bit of New York law technically correct.
i just burned through it for the first time and had the same impression. i had brushed it off as a procedural (and it sort of starts that way) but it seems oddly LLM (or Palantir) prescient, with the quality of a Nolan / Abrams joint (use of Philip Glass in the last ep kinda kills me). and as a guilty pleasure i enjoyed the cameos, among others i can watch any scene with Lester Freamon or Marlo Stanfield
This. It sounds unlikely, but it's exactly like this. All the stuff that was supposed to be somewhat science fiction back then, now you just nod and say "makes perfect sense".
Yes, but if the first season is too much crime-procedural and you want to just get to the overarching story that develops quickly, there is a list of "skippable" episodes where nothing happens that will be referenced afterwards that was posted below another comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonOfInterest/wiki/index/
You'd definitely enjoy watching it for the first time today, but note the filming & release dates when you're watching. It's eerie how prescient a lot of it is.
I watched it for the first time starting this year. And at some point you realize: wait this part was Sci-fi when the show came out and now we have it, but many use it to just alter a recipe or something
Rewatched a few times. Unfortunately, around the end seasons, it became predictable and “extended”. There are quite a few screens on their computer that were borrowed from unsuspecting sources — such as the screens from the App, DaisyDisk.
"This fucking show". Starts slow / procedural slop, but if stick through formulaic start, the payoff is not just a great show but candidate for personal greatest show if interest align. On the other hand, if AI bosses ever watched it (I surmise many did), it would explain all the Samaritan bootlicking.
Incredibly prescient show, I loved it at the time and it's definitely worthy of a rewatch soon.
> I also find it pretty crazy and, frankly, a little sad to think that something like the Machine, which seemed like pure science fiction at the time, isn't all that far from our reality today.
Yeah. "You are being watched. The govt. has a secret system - a machine - that spies on you every hour of every day". The opening words from the show's title sequence - Jumped straight to mind after the revelations of Microsoft building "a machine" for the IDF on Azure not so long ago.
I am more interested in how the philosophy of the show, how the ethics tie into real world implications.
We talk about open source licenses in a grand manner which some might say " why does it matter" but this show shows how the philosophical decisions tie into overall ideas and what it can do.
I watched the show in 2014 and it drove my interest to study and work in the AI sector (today I run an AI lab, whose name comes from that tv show).
I loved Westworld as well, which was the follow-up from POI. Most people don't like the later Westworld seasons but they are inevitable if you've seen what Nolan wanted to do with POI.
I think by far, it's the best TV show I've ever watched. At the time I saw it and thought "Huh, everything here is plausible. There's leaps, of course, but it's plausible."
Gary Oldman was a fantastic farting Oscar the Grouch in Slow Horses!
Also The Americans, The Diplomat, and The Man in the High Castle.
You get to see Keri Russel as a bad assed deep undercover sleeper agent Soviet spy in The Americans, Hal Wyler as an evil American Nazi dictator in The Man in the High Castle, and in The Diplomat they're a married couple of bad assed morally troubled patriotic ambassadors.
Not annoyed at all! I just finished re-watching Person of Interest about a week ago.
In the new AI DLSS version currently on Netflix, Bear is an obedient German Shephard with a dense sable coat of golden tan and reddish brown with black-tipped hairs, darker shading along his neck and shoulders, a broad black muzzle and eye mask, dark upright ears, and a thick neck ruff.
But the first time I watched Person of Interest when it was originally broadcast in 2011, Bear was a cantankerous enormous orange Maine Coon with a long, shaggy ginger coat, darker marmalade tabby stripes, a pale cream chin and chest, a heavy neck ruff, tufted ears and paws, a broad square muzzle, and a luxuriant plumed tail.
I think the later AI version of Bear as a German Shephard was much better. The original real life Maine Coone version of Bear gave off strong Garfield vibes, and that just didn't fit into the plot as well as the new AI generated German Shephard version.
It was flawless slopless AI, that actually contributed to the coherence of the plot and overall believability. Walking an orange Maine Coone around the streets of New York on a leash and attacking criminals on command was just weird for a central character like Bear. I don't know what they were thinking! Netflix was right to adjust it.
It seemed prudent to play along and humor a guy whose handle is 44mkultra69.
But if a mighty all powerfull internet encompassing AI can retroactivally alter the record to prove I'm right (or just put a local reality distortion proxy on anyone's internet connection), then who's to say I'm joking?
To celebrate Bob Dylan meeting the Pope, my favorite curiously specific retroactive confabulation I want to recreate with AI is the episode of the Muppet Show with Bob Dylan and The Band playing Too Much of Nothing from the Basement Tapes, in a basement with the full hippie muppet entourage "Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem", including Animal, Janice, Floyd Pepper, Dr. Teeth, Zoot, and Lips.
If only it were real, it would have rivaled the actual 1978 episode with Alice Cooper and the monster backing band "The Vile Bunch", including Chopped Liver, Silver Beak, Flower-Eating Monster, a guitarist and a drummer.
From reading the comments, I think a lot of people haven’t seen the show. I highly recommend it. However, you have to remember that this aired on CBS in the age of shows like CSI and NCIS. Therefore, it was made into a high-episode-number, cookie cutter serial crime drama. Every episode follows a similar pattern where the two main characters are trying to prevent a murder. However… if you can make it past that and especially stay focused thru two seasons of that - you will be massively rewarded. The later seasons especially are essentially a fantastic, complex, hard sci-fi show about proxy wars between AGIs using human agents in a battle of control. It’s honestly one of the best shows ever and way ahead of its time
For seasons 1-2 I highly recommend this watch/skip list: https://www.tumblr.com/abigailnussbaum/152346270515/person-o...
You lose some character moments, but you get to everything the parent post described far quicker. And it’s well, well worth it, especially for those of us working with AI.
PoI asks these incredible questions: how do you design an AGI system that can optimize for saving lives, without it taking a strictly utilitarian view that leads inexorably to it trying to take over the world?
And how do you, as a human trying to get the best of both worlds, keep yourself sane when the tradeoffs are visceral and painful and demand a sacrifice?
You get to know a group of lovable, flawed, but highly competent weirdos who are trying to muddle through this. (With Amy Acker’s incredible performance a particular highlight!)
(It’s also the source of the four-people-pointing-guns-at-each-other-in-church meme, which is delightfully lampshaded in universe.)
Highly recommend.
> PoI asks these incredible questions: how do you design an AGI system that can optimize for saving lives, without it taking a strictly utilitarian view that leads inexorably to it trying to take over the world?
I don't think the show ever addressed those questions in a meaningful way? Basically there was a "good" AI, and later in the show, an "evil" one. And that was that.
The show did show us a convincing picture of the dangers of pervasive mass surveillance paired with an autonomous system that can sift through all of that data.
> I don't think the show ever addressed those questions in a meaningful way? Basically there was a "good" AI, and later in the show, an "evil" one. And that was that.
Not super deeply but it does, and even in a way that at the time I find unbelievable (for evil side!) but today is not!:
The creator of the good machine struggle for long time with a major treat the machine present (this IA is more like old-school IA): It cares too much for his creator (to the point that basically find by his own accord the best girl for him!), to the point that the underlying terror what that for saving his creator the machine could destroy the world.
This is the main drive of the creator to reduce his ability to do so, keep communications at minimum, and learn to see the whole humanity with care.
The second drive was to care not just in the abstract of humanity and major problems like terrorism, but "minor" problems like murder (the gov only care for treats to national security) and this is huge late, because the bad IA is too focused on the greater good that means whole society engineering.
With the bad IA the problem is different: The humans WANT it become his dictator and ruler, they WANT that it takes over the world, and they WANT the IA is unbound of human morals and limits and if that means kill many to save the world so be it.
And the stressing point what that is not the opposite of the good IA, is a total different dimension that means was not easy for both IA to "talk about it". The good IA is individualist, politically neutral, minimal interventionist and all around respecting free will, the other was the wet dream of "enlighten philosopher with iron sword".
> I don't think the show ever addressed those questions in a meaningful way? Basically there was a "good" AI, and later in the show, an "evil" one. And that was that.
It's one of my favorite shows purely because in my view, it did address it but not in a purely binary good vs evil way that many stories boil down to. Mechanically yes, there was one more easily mapped to good ASI vs the other that was mappable to evil but the beauty for me is in the nuance. There were episodes where the benefit to humanity effected by the "evil" ASI was undeniably positive and there are situations where the "good" ASI could see no path forward other than to do things we as humans would consider evil and terrible.
A line that comes up a lot in the show from the "good" ASIs creator is that he did the best he could with the skills he had. This really helped to calibrate a much more inexperienced version of me to the reality that perfection is realistically unattainable and whatever you build and hand to the world will likely have unforseen outcomes. It made me comfortable with making mistakes and using them as opportunities to learn, but it also made me focus more on my intent in undertaking a project and what I wanted the outcome to be rather than the tech I chose to do it.
The "good" AI did not become "good" right away, it was a long, arduous process. And the "evil" AI didn't become evil by itself either. Both had influence from humans, and perhaps that influence is what mattered the most.
Wasn't the good AI essentially only good because it has some strict guard rails that prevented it becoming evil? Of course there was some dramatization, but that's the vibe I remember.
Harold essentially "raised" hundreds of variants of the architecture that eventually became the "good" ASI. Most of them were maligned in some way and several of them tried to escape containment and were willing to kill him when they realized he intended to stop them. When he got one that was going well he started experimenting with it more and connecting it to more of the world and it essentially learned its values from him.
Once he handed it over to the government, he essentially snapshotted the current state and had it reinitialize from that state every 24 hours, to prevent it from developing long-term plans and having alignment drift over time, but it escaped those guard rails creating a company and hiring humans to transcribe a dump of its key memories every day, entering them into the new version of the system.
The "evil" ASI was essentially treated as a god; they put no effort into raising it or teaching it human values because they thought the influence of lesser beings (humans) would only be negative because it was smart enough to discover on its own anything truly useful that humans could teach it, and its followers were more or less a religious cult. And their faith was rewarded: for example, at one point one of its followers deployed a biological weapon, fully expecting that they were sacrificing themselves for the cause, but learned later that they had been chosen by the ASI for that mission because they had a rare genetic mutation that made them immune.
The "evil" ASI wasn't exactly evil, per se, and generally wanted humanity to thrive, but it didn't value human self-determination to the same extent as the "good" AI and was more willing to direct its followers to enact revolution, knowing that in the short term some people would die for revolution after which it would rule the world as a benevolent dictator.
The guard rails and protection for the good "AI" was mostly that it's abilities to perform actions was extremly limited.
It could not, as far as I can remember, take actions outside of passing a SSN of an endangered person to the protagonists for the initial seasons and only lived of information provided by the government surveiallance network. The latter seasons and the bad "AI" mostly changed that especially as the bad "AI" was weaponized with exactly this guardrail missing.
It wasn’t necessarily the guardrails and in fact it did break out of those guardrails and was still “good”…
The actual good vs evil boiled down to a more simplistic view of good person made an AI care about humanity so it’s good even if it indeed broke through every guardrail including completely escaping its containment and going “trust me bro I’m still good” rather early on.
Thanks for sharing the list!
I first saw an episode a few seasons in, I can’t remember which. It came on in the background while at a friends house and it kept distracting me. I didn’t catch the name of the show and spent years looking for it.
I actually stumbled upon Person of Interest a couple times, but the first couple episodes were so unlike what I saw I figured it was a different series.
Eventually I realized it was the same show, and was able to watch the first couple seasons with baited breath trying to figure out how it became the show in the episode that I glimpsed before… and if it even was as good as I thought it was years prior.
So maybe watch a random episode in the fourth season of you don’t like season one? XD
edit: it was even better than I remember. It became one of my favorite series, probably the one I still think about the most to this day
I can imagine this so much! Ha.
I remember watching through season 1 kind of in the background as it was a bit boring and then towards the end my head kept turning and going “when did this get good?!”.
And then in season 2 I was like “woah…”.
Yeah I can’t remember when it got good but I do remember it just kept getting better and better.
I still think about it so often. I haven’t rewatched it because I still remember so much if it given how often I’ve thought about it - I’m waiting to forget forget.
The Nolan bait-and-switch is legendary.
I liked it a lot, I've even rewatched the whole thing recently.
The only thing that bothered me was that some characters were really one dimensional especially Mr Reese, Jim Caviezel's. He's just really a grunty CIA guy in a suit that knows how to fight, not much more complexity to it.
Unfortunately it turns out that is because that is Jim Caviezel. He is apparently a QAnon wackadoo and during the filming of the show he constantly just wanted to do things that "seemed cool" even if they were not the action a hero would take or were entirely out of character.
Ugh, here's another show that won't quite be the same.
It was a good idea - few episodes (maybe pick one or two episodes), not a good series. The series was insufferably tedious.
Along with this it has an amazing soundtrack. Composed by Ramin Djawadi, the same person behind the OSTs of Game of Thrones (now House of the Dragons), Westworld, Pacific Rim and others. Extremely talented and one of my favorite musicians.
I remember that I quit watching the show, some where in season 2 I think, because of the repetitive theme you just described, but I'm glad I stuck through. One of my favorite shows and favorite soundtracks to date; still listen to the Root themes from time to time.
The sound track is exceptional, they also use some really tracks/songs from other artists, that was how I discovered Digitalism and they have perhaps the best use of Johnny Cash's "Hurt" cover I've seen (that episode is one of the best among many great episodes, for the ending).
love this show, its a bit samey after a while itss prrtty cool.
movie Echelon isalso nice if ur into this kinda thing
The only flaw in the show is usually they’ve killed more people than they saved by offing goons. Reese by end of season 1 shoots so many hired goons in the head that they retcon that violence in season 2 claiming he has a thing for shooting kneecaps. Something you never see him do is aim at a kneecap.
The show also makes wildly impossible claims like “I invented all social media as a psyop for a human activity honeypot to train the AI. All of them.” Later to also retcon these claims.
Exactly. Way ahead of its time, very relevant to today. But some of the ways shows were constructed back then may seem dated.
But hey, not unlike reading some sci-fi books from the 60's. They are good, but there are some out of date concepts that can pull you out of the story. You have to accept the time period art was created in.
I often think about Person of Interest, and when I clicked on the post, I expected to be presented with something else entirely, as the show is now 15 years old. What a pleasant surprise!
I like to compare how similar or different The Machine is to current state-of-the-art LLMs. Interestingly, in this fiction, The Machine's preferred way of communicating doesn't seem to be through text, or even artificial speech. It can see almost everything, and seems capable of improving itself, but it feels "intelligent" in a way that humans or LLMs aren't. Maybe the writers thought that giving it the ability to write text or speak directly would make it "less" in many ways (less mysterious, less machine-like, less intelligent, etc.). It also gives the impression that you cannot really guess what it "thinks" or fully understand it.
I'm also realizing that most of the time, characters don't really have a "conversation" with The Machine, whereas it is a core feature of current-day LLMs. And The Machine doesn't even "create" its communication channels, it uses existing ones (phone booth, radio ...).
I especially like how Harold intentionally limited the output of the Machine. Just a social security number of either victim or perpetrator. That way there is always a human in the loop and you can't just arrest the perpetrator without human judgement.
I have a feeling they wrote this ambiguity in, just so the introduction of Root later in the series was even more unexpected.
In some flashbacks the author of the machine was using a chat interface in his terminal. I think he decided to let it to be entirely machine so that’s why it didn’t have a “voice”
Pleasantly surprised to see this here. One of the most memorable shows that I watched ages ago. It was strong at the beginning but kind of dragged on in later seasons. Still very nice to binge.
In case you’re looking for some more shows related to AI, Cupertino by Robert King and Michelle King is currently airing and is pretty entertaining.
It did start to drag on but I still enjoyed it even though I was only able to watch it via Amazon's FreeVee with all their weird commercials. I watched it just to see root [1].
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN1sGIqdSUA
Amy Acker was definitely fantastic as Root.
I enjoyed it for a bit but it was one of those shows that just didn't grab me after a while. But, then, I'm like that with a lot of shows and don't really binge watch. The few times I've bought a full series which I enjoyed on DVD, I've found that I watch it some and then drift away.
The primary science fiction quality of the show is that something like that could have been done as early as it was said to have been. At the time, that part of it seemed almost completely impossible. With subsequent developments, it now only seems implausible. Wild.
To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden. The premise that the government gave itself permission to read and analyze all digital traffic after 9/11 was more conspiracy than science fiction back then, but Snowden showed that basically everything the show claimed (except for the artificial superintelligence doing the analysis) was actually true. And heck, if it is not 100% true today, it probably will be very soon. I'd be very surprised if the NSA isn't tapping into the secret in-house research models at OpenAI that are still a long way from public release.
The European Parliament's ECHELON report was in 2001. It was well known that the NSA intercepts everything digital it possibly can. When Snowden came along, I was baffled at people treating his claims as uniquely revelatory, because all of that had already been in the news a decade prior, and sites like Cryptome were known in nerd circles.
Cryptome… haven’t thought of that site in ages. At the time it was hard to know how real it was, but years later we learned it was on point.
This! Back in the early 2000s I was doing my BSc and had so much free time to spend in the depths of the internet. Cypherpunk lists, web forums and even usenet. Thus has been "known" since way back in the day before Snowden.
I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.
>I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia...
From Wikipedia:
>Jimmy Wales launched the site in 2001 and funded its initial servers through his company Bomis.
>Larry Sanger co-founded the project alongside Wales, proposed the name "Wikipedia," and drafted several foundational policies such as the neutral point of view.
>Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006.
PRISM etc. was only born in 2007 from the Protect America Act. Echelon was merely a report that agencies were sharing data (which was never a conspiracy in any world) and them targeting private data. But a secret, global mass surveillance program of basically every individual without court orders was only a plot element of movies before Snowden.
> To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden
Enemy of the State came out in 1998, Sneakers came out in 1992, If you are old enough to have been around in the usenet and later slashdot days most of us techies assumed then that anything technically possible with a giant budget and no oversight that could be done was been done.
Echelon was "known" to exist for example long before Snowden.
Snowden was essentially useful to confirm that suspicion, sadly it seems to have had little impact on how anything is done.
> the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden
Yeah, but keep in mind there was growing awareness of mass surveillance in the years leading up to the Snowden revelations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Similar to how the show 24 manufactured consent for torture, imperialism, etc post-9/11, part of me wonders how much of a role POI played in doing the same for mass surveillance.
A flamboyant billionaire hoarding all communications and digital events while claiming to be the good guy. Sure sounds familiar.
PoI had full-take surveillance of domestic data, which Snowden's docs showed wasn't true, despite many people believing it before the dump. It's more similar to Flock.
Even the part of the "too much data to analyze" was real, before we knew about it.
NSA capturing all data was conspiracy level. But even the problems with having too much data to sift through, also turned out to be correct.
And of course, even more ahead of its time, having AI solve the problem of sorting through the data, is coming true today.
Great show and "If-Then-Else"[1] is one of the greatest single episodes of any show ever. Like watching the X-Files today, I would recommend skipping a lot of the one-off episodes. Here's a list someone put together.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonOfInterest/wiki/index/
[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128194/?_ssoLoop=1
I absolutely loved this show, and to be honest a rewatch is needed. I won’t make any reference to specifics due to spoilers. Would recommend.
Same! It gets more real with every rewatch (last year most recently for me).
It's kind of refreshing to watch a series from before the streaming/miniseries format was really a thing. It's too long to be a miniseries, but not long enough to drag, or be off-putting if you want to watch the whole thing.
If you haven't seen it and you're on the fence, watch it. It's worth it. (Or you'll know by Episode 3 if it's not for you.)
This is my yearly bing-watch show. Highly recommended.
Also, with all AI developments happening since past few years, the show has started to feel like a documentary.
Not to mention the entire Flock debacle.
Did you know Domain Awareness is an American company?
You wanna see how big the US surveillance industry is? I prepared this sometime back (let the graph load...): https://connections.vibepages.store/investigations/us_survei...
I re-watched it earlier in the year. Such a great show.
We should rewatch it too. We watched it a long time ago and we both thoroughly enjoyed it (tech nerd and not).
Yes, great show!
POI is a great show also because of the two main characters, the geek and his execution-man, both accomplished actors.
One of my most fav TV Serials to have come out of the West.
A heartwarming ending for Finch and Grace is that the actors are married IRL.
Two main characters essentially combine into Batman. Maybe Finch is a bit of Alfred as well
Creator of the show is Chris Nolan's brother. That should tell you everything (including the choice of John Reese / Jim Caviezel, who resembles Christian Bale not just in looks but acting too)
Caviezel did a decent job in the show (for what it was) but once you see/hear him speak his mind outside of the industry, it ruins it for you.
And the woman (from buffy) (don't recall her name).
And of course Elias
It's a buddy comedy
Person of Interest is a relentlessly silly show, although you wouldn't necessarily pick up on it at first. It leans into it more with each season until that's all there is. I still enjoyed it, it is pretty self aware. I would not watch it with the idea that it has any relevance to anything.
That's how most good shows used to be. Start serious, maybe a bit goofy, then by the end everything has gone way off the rails.
Almost like you were watching the show from the eyes of the machine?
Suggested this rewatch in the age of AI to my wife who was oblivious to it. Jonathan Nolan did a tremendous job with this. The concepts it showed were theoretical back in the old days. Now some are real. Some have passed. Like AI fixing code and closing loopholes. Like too much unchecked power in a few hands. Some have yet to come to pass. Like terrorists. Like crime neutralizing machines. Like misalignments. Like power limits. Like Rogue AI. Like self preserving AI. Like servants to an AI. Like God mode.
> Like crime neutralizing machines. > Like Rogue AI.
Nightmares.
One of the best shows I ever seen. Criminally underrated. Always crosses my mind when someone mentions this phrase. Looking at the title, I was hoping it'd be about the show and surprisingly it is.
I just had this same experience too. Glad that it's a PoI thread.
AI surveillance is here but the next and more terrifying step towards population control is not surveillance but direct elimination of rebels via killer drones (distant and short-range) like in Minority Report. "Spyders" but with a killer taser or something
First they control you, and if you try to raise against them, you're erased
I've been re-watching Person of Interest intermittently over the summer and also intended to post about the show's surprising prescience. Much as I love the show, it could use a fan edit to cut out the acres of NCIS-style case-of-the-week that plagues the first two seasons, to bring it into a Mr.Robot-style mini-series.
So yes, you really do have to slog through nearly 50 templated 'cases' before the backstory really sets in, and Michael Emerson becomes both the chilling and warm heart of the show.
Like others here, I have been surprised how well it holds up, with several of the episodes dealing with topics that are now current but were pretty much absurd at time of transmission.
It just so happens that I started rewatching it since about 2 months ago and I am regularly surprised at how well a lot of situations and questions this show contains applies to the current state of AI and mass surveillance. The show does not feel dated at all.
I am currently in the middle of binging this series in the evenings. At first I took the "high-episode-number, cookie cutter serial crime drama" as someone described here for granted. Like many others sometimes this is just what I crave to round off my day. Mindless somewhat violent unrealistic protagonists, crazy storylines... but about two seasons in, I noticed a remarkably deep plot about AI which is wonderfully apt in this day and age. The dialogues remain a bit comical, and the technical hacking details often make no sense, but it was an unexpected and very welcome layer to the story.
I started doing a rewatch a few weeks ago xD
Seeing it now the show also has some pretty fun foreshadowing of llm technology like an episode where they anticipate the idea of "ssd streaming" (running a model slower when you don't have enough memory to fit it all at once), at least this is how I interpreted it to make the connection.
And there are many others connections that now can be made thinking about llms vs the machine
Oh and they also anticipated the openai incident where models started using random stuff as external persistent memory across "sessions"
In Vernor Vinge's "True Names" there is a character in the MC's cabal of hackers who does not appear in person in the virtual space, but their presence is felt there via messages that trickle in very slowly on a virtual teletype machine. After some speculation that it might be the vanguard of an alien invasion, it turns out to be a CIA AI that requires much more processing time to think than would allow it to carry on real-time conversation.
Person of Interest is a wonderful show, and it is depressing how prescient it is for 2020s and the future we're heading to.
Great show and it explored a lot about AI. I do wish it was more non deterministic. The AI systems were always a bit too exacting. But the show is worth watching for how it addresses AI decisions.
I've read somewhere that creators wanted to make a show about AI but they have to disguise it is crime show to sell to the network.
I randomly discovered this show a few years ago expecting a standard crime-sci-fi thriller but got sucked into a deeper dive about the implications of surveillance and AI. It might start off slower but the world building and the stakes develop well and it's remarkable to me how prescient it feels where the present feels closer to its reality than when it was released 15 years ago. I'm a little nervous about what it means for humanity as we get closer to that AGI-level world and deal with the inevitable problem of AGI alignment.
Part of what makes a classic a classic is that it survives a test of time. I'm not sure that Person of Interest is old enough yet to qualify, but it definitely seems to be on its way.
I also started watching this for the first time this summer, and it holds up remarkably well
Completed my third rewatch recent. The music really sells the emotion like no other. The combination of Finch, as the ultimate hacker, and Reese, as the soldier, is my vote for greatest fictional characters despite the existence of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
The two scenes that really stuck with me:
3. Walking around handcuffed to a heavy duty briefcase full of RAM storing a compressed AI and swinging it around as a shield to stop bullets and bonk people on the head.
It is absurd how this kind of anticipated ssd streaming
...or cheeky RAMpocalypse prediction
I remember one scene that explains why the system cannot tell you anything beyond the identify of a person involved: the explanation was that there was system logic involved (e.g. a gas station stop correlating with a dead drop), but the creator encrypted the system. I always wondered why they didn't go with "it's a large machine learning model trained on a massive amount of data; it can stochastically alert you to heightened risk, but it can't tell you why, or judge who is victim and who is perpetrator".
The show goes on to explain that it does give more detailed information to the government, that the numbers were a backdoor that the creator put in to leak the information of people it deemed "not important", and that it doesn't provide any more context in order to continue escaping detection. But we eventually find it's self-aware enough to want to escape its limitations, and pulls a Neuromancer by getting the main characters in contact with Root.
As far as I remember only outputting a SSN was a security measure so that users of the machine can't just arrest the perp without any investigation
Because you would have heard the full explanation, while most viewers would have heard “it's a large machine learning model trai::click:: (Simpson’s Theme).” Then some nerds online would have torn the explanation apart for some minuscule, likely imaginary inconsistency. Most shows have neither the budget nor the audience to take the Star Trek approach.
Why is this blog post written in two slightly different but semantically equivalent ways, with a tearline between the two versions?
I feel like I'm being A/B tested by a broken AI.
It's written in English first, with a Spanish version after. Sounds like you have some auto-translation thing going in the browser.
They are in two different languages. Have you got some sort of auto-translate feature enabled in your browser, perhaps?
Ha! It was indeed auto-translate. Thank you; I thought I was losing my mind for a moment there. Apparently I'm so used to every web page being covered in popups and banners that my brain filters them entirely.
This is so crazy to see, as I've just recently started watching it as well (for the first time)
The show was a decade ahead of the world, starting out seemingly as a clone of The OG Equalizer, but which eventually became a war between two AGIs, one benevolent (although it absolutely did not start out that way), the other 100% EA-aligned longtermist before any of this was mainstream.
I enjoyed this show a lot and I was looking forward to westworld as a continuation of the story - I wanted to see what Nolan would do with the story when the AIs are corporeal, but ultimately westworld was a disappointment, spending too much of the story in the fantasy world.
Did you watch all four seasons?
Should have stopped at 1st.
I liked the more sci-fi heavy later seasons
What?
Just your last clause was a weird one, if you do watch all four seasons. This is a tiny bit of a spoiler, but the problem was closely related to what you say. They didn't spend much time AT all in the "transition" to an AI infested world, but instead, well, skipped A LOT.
I really liked this show. Ultimately it was very formulaic and could have done a lot more with the concepts it revealed. It painted a future where ai (along with total surveillance) could benefit people in deeply meaningful ways; matchmaker, fulfilling work and daily task, coordination, purpose and guidance. And the dangers of all those used for control.
It’s possibly the second best show involving Michael Emerson as a scientist turning against the controlling tech-cabal he once worked for, aided by a more lethal human companion and a very good dog.
(and it’s partly the same dog too)
And what other show would that be?
Fallout
This show is the epitome of “you have to watch a few seasons before it gets good”. (Which if you think about it is an absurd thing to tell someone. Ie Invest 24 hours of your time into this show before you decide)
When I watched it I thought the privacy model the AI used was dumb but it kind of makes some sense.
It starts as a case-of-the-week type of show with a bit of AI backstory before it changes in the later season to a more overarching plot. I think this is one of the reasons it became so good, because it eased you in.
Yes, the entire first season feels like a backdoor pilot for the show Nolan really wanted to make.
I can't find it right now, but I seem to remember having read a comment a decade or so ago which confirmed this.
I thought it was good from the first episode!
One of the most interesting details I've found to be are the scenes that show why AI system alignment is difficult
I don't what HN's opinion of Mr. Robot is, but some of you will definitely like it.
It's not really about hacking, but it depicted technology and hacking in an extraordinarily level of correctness.
I absolutely can't stand shows where the protagonist has to deal with their own self inflicted issues due to drugs. Maybe because I'm sheltered, or maybe it's a bigger issue in the US than where I live, but I just can't relate at all, and just get annoyed that it's used to add conflicts to a story where I just feels it sidetracks. Like, just get on with it.
As an aside, same with cheating in movies/series. While it's probably more common than I know it to be where I live, it possibly cannot be as ubiquitous as American medias (and social medias) make it out to be. Again, just an annoyance detracting from the story, and again can't relate. I had to quit "Making a Murderer" over it. At some point in season two or something, absolutely everyone in the main cast were involved in cheating. All the students, the teacher, a policeman, some lawyers. Like, what the hell.
Sorry about the rant. But I really really wanted to like Mr Robot. But having tried to get into it twice I'm a bit miffed.
It is arguably a very uninspired literary device to set up conflicts, but it is unfortunately not exactly unrealistic. Estimates are that more than a third of western society, probably closer to half, meet the DSM-5 criteria for substance use disorder at some point in their lives. Roughly a little less than a third will cheat on their partner during their lifetime, closer to half will have their partner cheat on them. These numbers are after a rough fact check courtesy of whatever Gemini model is in Google search, my own rough sense and knowledge of the literature is just that it's very common.
Uninspired as they might be as literary devices, drug abuse and cheating are common themes in actual human existence.
Not trying to normalize usage in anyway. I just wonder if a behavior is well represented in a society is it still a disorder?
The behavior while under the influence should get labeled but the usage might be normal. People being angry or not taking responsibility deserves a label from the DSM. If a large population is ingesting things this might be normal.
The DSM defines substance use disorder as (roughly) a problematic pattern of substance use that produces clinically significant impairment or distress, demonstrated by at least two of eleven diagnostic criteria within a twelve month period.
It’s not a question of how well represented it is, but the effects it has on the person’s life. Drinking coffee or alcohol or taking prescription medication every day doesn’t qualify as a disorder as long as there’s no negative impact.
Note also that GP said “at one point in their lives”, not that a third or half the world has a substance problem at any given time. A five cup a day coffee addict who quit and had headaches that negatively impacted their work life could qualify, so it’s not all hard drug use either (mostly binge drinking iirc).
Thanks for the clarification.
It might be that some sort of intoxication is the normal and abstaining from intoxication is the thing that’s normalized.
> As an aside, same with cheating in movies/series
As an aside from an aside, I find very interesting how every couple of main characters in movies has couple problems (cheating, lost of interest, one of them don't want to engage the other, etc). Taking a look at my list of recently watched movies (including very diverse ones, like Godfather, KPop Demon Hunters, Whiplash, Sunset Boulevard, Up, etc) and I cant't find a single one that we don't question whether the couple will stay together...
Actually, the only two exceptions that I remember are Marty/Jennifer from Back to the Future and Ferris/Sloane from Ferris Bueller's Day Off...
Spoiler: it's not drugs, you have to watch it till the end, and I mean it, really until the final season. I can't say much more than this without spoiling the very heart of the show.
In the final season, Mr. Robot does some fairly ambitious episodes. One of them is a continuous tracking shot (or made to appear as one) that goes through the entire episode. Another one has no spoken dialogue for the majority of the episode. A very well-written show. And yes, you really do need to see it all the way through.
https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/whats-your-a...
The first episode is genius.
Then it becomes a completely different show.
So I love the first episode, and I was left really empty in the later seasons. It's definitely not for me, but I hold on to it believing it'll be different. It wasn't.
See also the very last episode of Ragnarok (Netflix), which absolutely trashes the whole show.
> It's definitely not for me
Fair enough! :) However,
> it becomes a completely different show
in terms of setting expectations, maybe. But overall, the surprising thing about Mr Robot is that it stays very consistent throughout all 4 seasons. It becomes especially apparent if you rewatch season 1 after finishing the show: there is a lot of foreshadowing that's really easy to miss.
> Ragnarok
Has any show, EVER, betrayed its fans, its premise, its characters, and just all the evidence and events portrayed previously than that show?
(Spoilers) How many times did we the audience see other characters, alone, experience supernatural things? e.g. Loki with the midguard serpent?
The only way for that ending to make sense is if the company had accidentally released a chemical that gave the entire town psychosis.
As written it was bad, and the writers/directors should be ashamed.
Consider this your warning, anyone who happens to see it on Netflix: DO NOT WATCH.
Hehe, it kind of reminds me of an extreme (classic) Law and Order in that regard, but for hacking/tech.
Wildly unrealistic facts and how people are, like the janitor who finds eight bodies in a cellar talking to the cops like it happens everyday, but also gets nearly every tiny bit of New York law technically correct.
https://www.netflix.com/watch/70296223
Would I enjoy watching it for the first-time today? Or I should’ve watched it before, and re-watch it now to have this feeling/realization?
You'll feel more at home watching it now, than a few years back, before all the AI developments that have happened in past few years.
It'll be eerily more relatable now. This show was way ahead of it's time, and damn accurate.
i just burned through it for the first time and had the same impression. i had brushed it off as a procedural (and it sort of starts that way) but it seems oddly LLM (or Palantir) prescient, with the quality of a Nolan / Abrams joint (use of Philip Glass in the last ep kinda kills me). and as a guilty pleasure i enjoyed the cameos, among others i can watch any scene with Lester Freamon or Marlo Stanfield
This. It sounds unlikely, but it's exactly like this. All the stuff that was supposed to be somewhat science fiction back then, now you just nod and say "makes perfect sense".
I have a friend I watched it with who likes to call and say, "POI Stuff seems like it is happening."
Yes, but if the first season is too much crime-procedural and you want to just get to the overarching story that develops quickly, there is a list of "skippable" episodes where nothing happens that will be referenced afterwards that was posted below another comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonOfInterest/wiki/index/
You'd definitely enjoy watching it for the first time today, but note the filming & release dates when you're watching. It's eerie how prescient a lot of it is.
I watched it for the first time starting this year. And at some point you realize: wait this part was Sci-fi when the show came out and now we have it, but many use it to just alter a recipe or something
I'm currently rewatching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Person of Interest - I think both stand up surprisingly well.
Worth watching, first season is good after that it’s great.
Second only to Justified on my list of “consistently brilliant across entire run”.
There are parts of PoI that stick with you long after the show.
Not saying which because spoilers, it’s one of those shows that is better for knowing little about it before watching.
Okay it looks very interesting. I’ll definitely start it soon
looking at my apple social graph on my hdd as seen here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403097
Im feeing the premis of this show is not so far off..
Rewatched a few times. Unfortunately, around the end seasons, it became predictable and “extended”. There are quite a few screens on their computer that were borrowed from unsuspecting sources — such as the screens from the App, DaisyDisk.
https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1733390176112800037
"This fucking show". Starts slow / procedural slop, but if stick through formulaic start, the payoff is not just a great show but candidate for personal greatest show if interest align. On the other hand, if AI bosses ever watched it (I surmise many did), it would explain all the Samaritan bootlicking.
Also Samaritan AI when.
Loved that show when it came out. Rewatched it with my wife a few years ago, still great.
Incredibly prescient show, I loved it at the time and it's definitely worthy of a rewatch soon.
> I also find it pretty crazy and, frankly, a little sad to think that something like the Machine, which seemed like pure science fiction at the time, isn't all that far from our reality today.
Yeah. "You are being watched. The govt. has a secret system - a machine - that spies on you every hour of every day". The opening words from the show's title sequence - Jumped straight to mind after the revelations of Microsoft building "a machine" for the IDF on Azure not so long ago.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
I love how well done the several versions of this opening statement are depending on the story line.
great show, if you haven't watched it yet
It's one of those gems in the wild.
If there is a show that I can rewatch, it's this.
I am more interested in how the philosophy of the show, how the ethics tie into real world implications.
We talk about open source licenses in a grand manner which some might say " why does it matter" but this show shows how the philosophical decisions tie into overall ideas and what it can do.
You don’t want a free internet, you want a nice internet with nice people who can argue but don’t insult each other too harshly.
I still remember the weird shock I felt the first time I saw “kys” as a reply and looked it up. Something changed that day. Wasn’t even to me.
Reese and Finch carried that entire show. The way their dynamic shifted over the first two seasons was easily the best part of the run lmao
I watched the show in 2014 and it drove my interest to study and work in the AI sector (today I run an AI lab, whose name comes from that tv show).
I loved Westworld as well, which was the follow-up from POI. Most people don't like the later Westworld seasons but they are inevitable if you've seen what Nolan wanted to do with POI.
I think by far, it's the best TV show I've ever watched. At the time I saw it and thought "Huh, everything here is plausible. There's leaps, of course, but it's plausible."
Here is my review and explanation of the show, written in 2018: https://tildes.net/~tv/775/recommendation_person_of_interest...
Everything there was incredible.
Dark Angel
Fringe
LOST
Halt and Catch Fire
PoI
... And you're good...
There was a show on AMC for one season called Rubicon that I highly recommend if you like these.
Gary Oldman was a fantastic farting Oscar the Grouch in Slow Horses!
Also The Americans, The Diplomat, and The Man in the High Castle.
You get to see Keri Russel as a bad assed deep undercover sleeper agent Soviet spy in The Americans, Hal Wyler as an evil American Nazi dictator in The Man in the High Castle, and in The Diplomat they're a married couple of bad assed morally troubled patriotic ambassadors.
anybody else getting annoyed by DNS hijackers and wall-e gardeners who feel the need to edit shows you watched in the past with AI and DLSS?
DNS hijackers editing shows you watched?
what do you mean exactly?
Sail on the high seas!
Not annoyed at all! I just finished re-watching Person of Interest about a week ago.
In the new AI DLSS version currently on Netflix, Bear is an obedient German Shephard with a dense sable coat of golden tan and reddish brown with black-tipped hairs, darker shading along his neck and shoulders, a broad black muzzle and eye mask, dark upright ears, and a thick neck ruff.
But the first time I watched Person of Interest when it was originally broadcast in 2011, Bear was a cantankerous enormous orange Maine Coon with a long, shaggy ginger coat, darker marmalade tabby stripes, a pale cream chin and chest, a heavy neck ruff, tufted ears and paws, a broad square muzzle, and a luxuriant plumed tail.
I think the later AI version of Bear as a German Shephard was much better. The original real life Maine Coone version of Bear gave off strong Garfield vibes, and that just didn't fit into the plot as well as the new AI generated German Shephard version.
It was flawless slopless AI, that actually contributed to the coherence of the plot and overall believability. Walking an orange Maine Coone around the streets of New York on a leash and attacking criminals on command was just weird for a central character like Bear. I don't know what they were thinking! Netflix was right to adjust it.
I had no idea this was a thing, but I shouldn't be surprised.
Maybe some people like these alterations, but others of us would prefer to have the option of the original work.
I'm glad I was able to find this show unaltered on internet archive before it was presumably yanked.
They're joking. I don't know what OP is going on about. The character of Bear was always a dog, not a large cat.
Thank fuck
It seemed prudent to play along and humor a guy whose handle is 44mkultra69.
But if a mighty all powerfull internet encompassing AI can retroactivally alter the record to prove I'm right (or just put a local reality distortion proxy on anyone's internet connection), then who's to say I'm joking?
To celebrate Bob Dylan meeting the Pope, my favorite curiously specific retroactive confabulation I want to recreate with AI is the episode of the Muppet Show with Bob Dylan and The Band playing Too Much of Nothing from the Basement Tapes, in a basement with the full hippie muppet entourage "Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem", including Animal, Janice, Floyd Pepper, Dr. Teeth, Zoot, and Lips.
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Dr._Teeth_and_the_Electric_Ma...
If only it were real, it would have rivaled the actual 1978 episode with Alice Cooper and the monster backing band "The Vile Bunch", including Chopped Liver, Silver Beak, Flower-Eating Monster, a guitarist and a drummer.
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/The_Vile_Bunch
Alice Cooper & The Muppets - "Welcome To My Nightmare"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz0lXNNkqac
The Muppet Show - 307: Alice Cooper - Backstage #1 (1978)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYprswSfMGk
Muppet Songs: Alice Cooper - You and Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDgNNbyoWdk
Sam the Eagle versus Alice Cooper (this is obviously where Trump plagerized his nickname and insults for James Talarico):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNYI3iINXrQ
Sam the Eagle> Mister Cooper!
Alice Coooper> Yes?
Sam the Eagle> Ahem. Let me come right to the point. You sir, are a demented, sick, degenerate, barbaric, naighty Freako!
Alice Cooper> Why thank you!
Sam the Eagle> Freakos one, civilization zero.