Person of Interest

Back in Fall 2017, I was looking for some new TV show to watch. I'd been rec'd the TV series Person of Interest a number of times, most notably by SE, so I decided to give it a try. I jumped in with both feet and watched the entire series in less than a month. The show was uneven in many respects, and the final, shortened season felt simultaneously rushed and too long. But it also provides some awesome found-family moments, a couple of tragic romances that fed my soul, and possibly the best dog ever on television. Then, as I was catching up on older episodes of the podcast Our Opinions are Correct last year, I was reminded of this show and how good it was. I watched it again, from the beginning, and if anything I liked it even better the second time through. So here I am with my long-delayed, much-promised post on Person of Interest.

I do want to start off with a couple of content warnings, but they are MAJOR spoilers, so I'll be putting them under a cut. ( Spoilery warnings go here. )

Person of Interest starts off as a fairly run-of-the mill crime procedural, with two significant twists: the crimes are solved and victims protected not just by cops, but also by a team of vigilantes, and the potential victims and criminals are discovered by an AI, known as The Machine, who determines who is as risk by analyzing data from government surveillance feeds. But by the end of the first season, the story shifts into true speculative fiction, with a focus on questions about artificial intelligence. Is an AI a person? Does it have rights? How much agency is it ethical to program into an AI, and what happens when it becomes self-aware? By the end of the first season, The Machine is already a full-fledged character in its own right, a status that only becomes more pronounced over time. ( Cutting for length and spoilers. )

There's a lot more I could say about Person of Interest, from its excellent cast to its examination of all kinds of abuses of power, not just surveillance and AI, but I've already started and failed to finish this post twice, so I'll just leave it here, with a simple recommendation: if you're interested in stories about the morality and personhood of AI, and are able to roll with the warnings I've outlined above, I can't recommend it highly enough.