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
saidnooneever 2 hours ago
love this show, its a bit samey after a while itss prrtty cool.
movie Echelon isalso nice if ur into this kinda thing
barrell an hour ago
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
scrollaway an hour ago
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…”.
barrell 43 minutes ago
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.
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.
krthr an hour ago
Thanks for sharing the list!
soraminazuki 34 minutes ago
> 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.
Semaphor 7 minutes ago
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.
feearent an hour ago
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.
noir_lord 34 minutes ago
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).
wolvoleo an hour ago
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.
ocdtrekkie an hour ago
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.
soraminazuki 27 minutes ago
Ugh, here's another show that won't quite be the same.
FrustratedMonky 38 minutes ago
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.
righthand 22 minutes ago
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.
vgalin 2 hours ago
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 ...).
a012 2 hours ago
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”
bananzamba 2 hours ago
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.
odiroot 2 hours ago
I have a feeling they wrote this ambiguity in, just so the introduction of Root later in the series was even more unexpected.
Kuyawa 6 minutes ago
AI surveillance is here but the next and more terrifying step in world domination 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
microflash 3 hours ago
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.
ghaff 2 hours ago
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.
Bender 2 hours ago
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].
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.
randallsquared 3 hours ago
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.
sigmoid10 3 hours ago
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.
TFNA 2 hours ago
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.
xtracto 2 hours ago
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.
e40 2 hours ago
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.
swed420 2 hours ago
> 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:
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.
lern_too_spel an hour ago
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.
noir_lord 31 minutes ago
> 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.
FrustratedMonky 27 minutes ago
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.
trimbo 2 hours ago
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.
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.
seb1204 5 hours ago
I re-watched it earlier in the year. Such a great show.
amelius 4 hours ago
Yes, great show!
freakynit 4 hours ago
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.
cluckindan 2 hours ago
Not to mention the entire Flock debacle.
Did you know Domain Awareness is an American company?
microtonal 3 hours ago
We should rewatch it too. We watched it a long time ago and we both thoroughly enjoyed it (tech nerd and not).
DavidPiper 3 hours ago
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.)
jan_m_savage 4 hours ago
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.
drkleiner 3 hours ago
Two main characters essentially combine into Batman. Maybe Finch is a bit of Alfred as well
kshri24 3 hours ago
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)
emil-lp 3 hours ago
And the woman (from buffy) (don't recall her name).
And of course Elias
404mm 3 hours ago
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.
povik 3 hours ago
It's a buddy comedy
Hard_Space 2 hours ago
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.
nashashmi 4 hours ago
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.
Geezus_42 3 hours ago
> Like crime neutralizing machines.
> Like Rogue AI.
Nightmares.
kingston an hour ago
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.
doginasuit 3 hours ago
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.
Geezus_42 3 hours ago
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.
gsjhdheje 2 hours ago
Almost like you were watching the show from the eyes of the machine?
mvdwoord 2 hours ago
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.
aziis98 2 hours ago
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"
bitwize 37 minutes ago
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.
conqrr 2 hours ago
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.
feearent 2 hours ago
I just had this same experience too. Glad that it's a PoI thread.
eclectric 3 hours ago
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.
maxglute 13 minutes ago
"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.
gcanyon 2 hours ago
The two scenes that really stuck with me:
1. When Finch is out playing hide and seek with the machine.
2. When the machine is apologizing to Finch, telling him that it did its best.
DonHopkins 2 hours ago
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.
aziis98 an hour ago
It is absurd how this kind of anticipated ssd streaming
NooneAtAll5 6 minutes ago
...or cheeky RAMpocalypse prediction
hliyan 2 hours ago
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".
chuckadams 2 hours ago
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.
bananzamba 2 hours ago
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
DrewADesign 2 hours ago
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.
swiftcoder 5 hours ago
I also started watching this for the first time this summer, and it holds up remarkably well
comrade1234 4 hours ago
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.
cluckindan 4 hours ago
Did you watch all four seasons?
sam_lowry_ 4 hours ago
Should have stopped at 1st.
croes 3 hours ago
I liked the more sci-fi heavy later seasons
jrm4 4 hours ago
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.
gnfargbl 3 hours ago
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.
oskarpearson 3 hours ago
They are in two different languages. Have you got some sort of auto-translate feature enabled in your browser, perhaps?
gnfargbl 3 hours ago
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.
ACS_Solver 3 hours ago
It's written in English first, with a Spanish version after. Sounds like you have some auto-translation thing going in the browser.
LogicFailsMe an hour ago
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.
dartf an hour ago
This is so crazy to see, as I've just recently started watching it as well (for the first time)
