Watching Person of Interest in 2026

I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks, so I don’t expect there to be Notes for those Saturdays.

There’s a great new video on Andor from a YouTuber I follow.

Watching Person of Interest in 2026

It feels a bit strange to talk about Person of Interest in 2026.

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it’s all about artificial intelligence. In the wake of 9/11, Harold Finch (not his real name) built The Machine, an artificial intelligence connected to everything. The Machine predicts terrorist threats before they happen, and is never wrong. It also predicts violent crimes, which form the weekly episode stories, as Finch recruits former CIA agent John Reese (also not his real name) to stop those crimes before they happen. As the Plot goes on, we see an evil corporation make a deal with the government and plug their own AI, Samaritan, into government feeds, where it promptly silences dissent and attempts, with frightening success, to impose an authoritarian rule.

So maybe you’ve seen something in the news about artificial intelligence destroying humanity. It’s nonsense, of course–it’s a way for AI companies to pitch how powerful their technology is, how impressive their work is, and how important it is that they keep getting funding so that they can do their work without killing us all. Maybe you’ve gone further down that rabbit hole and been told that a large chunk of Silicon Valley is part of a cult-like atmosphere that is convinced that they have a moral imperative to build a godlike AI that will solve the world’s problems while leading us into a new age, and that every other moral choice is secondary to creating and activating the Machine God.

So. Um.

I’m pretty sure at least one of the writers from Person of Interest is spending a lot of time telling his or her friends, “I f***ing TOLD YOU SO!!!!”

I’m not saying that our present situation perfectly mirrors what happened in Person of Interest; it doesn’t. For starters, the people working on an AI overlord and praising it to high heaven in the show are a lot smarter than the people doing so in real life. They’re not building it because they’re intelligent people disillusioned with the ways human institutions can be corrupted, they’re trying to build it because they think it’s inevitable that someone is going to build it, so it might as well be someone in the US, because somehow those corporations are more trustworthy than Chinese ones.

Also, the AI might try to destroy humanity. This has been reiterated a lot, even though precisely how that would happen, or why an AI would feel the need to do that, has never really been adequately explained. I mean, we know that an AI corporation tried to convince the Pope that AI was a conscious mind, with a soul… and missed that it means they’re enslaving an intelligent being, and somehow missed this might be a step in the wrong direction if they’re convinced AI God might kill us all.

No, it’s not really convincing to me that ‘AI’ is really an intelligent, thinking being. What is convincing is that a bunch of people have either wishful thinking (brought on by a cult-like atmosphere whose dogma involves the inevitability of AI God) and people worried by how out of control these corporations are. We haven’t built Samaritan or the Machine; we’ve just built stupid corporations who refuse to take responsibility for their actions.

And so it’s this weird thing, because in some ways, because the show is grounded enough that it’s able to predict a very big thing about the future of the world… but it also misses something entirely, that people would really be incredibly stupid. The real world is stranger than fiction in many ways. I suppose they called it on the Robot Cult, where people are acting like the AIs are gods, because that’s a huge part of the story of Person of Interest (the season finale where the Machine is contained in a box is titled ‘YHWH’, for goodness sake). It’s just how this attempt at making a cyberpunk dystopia happened feels so removed from what we see in the show it’s almost comical.

Which doesn’t mean that the show is useless to us as a thoughtful story about AI in the modern day. I don’t think AI is close to becoming conscious anytime soon, but the question of what we do if it did is I think an important one. The way we approach surveillance, especially if we were to put decisions about it in the hands of an artificial intelligence, is definitely relevant in today’s world. And as countries are more and more relying on AI in military applications, it’s worth questioning the wisdom of those decisions.

[There are also a lot of things to say about government and society and violence and morality all in that show, but we’re sort of sticking to the relevant stuff for this Note.]

So yes, by all means watch Person of Interest to think about the important questions! Questions about AI, about technology, about society’s acceptance of it and government’s exploitations of it! I still maintain that it’s one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen. However! I think the more I think about it, the more I sincerely don’t think it’s some kind of prophecy for the times we’re living through now.

I’m pretty sure someone from that writers’ room is being very smug about some predictions, though.

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