Person of Interest

[owlmoose]

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.

If you are not a fan of major character death, this is not a show for you. A number of significant characters are killed, especially in the last season, but I want to mention two in particular. First, the only major black heroic character dies in the third season (although at least the show deals fully with the repercussions of her death). Second, you may have heard that this series has a canon f/f couple. It does, and it's a pretty great couple in many respects, but one of them dies in the lead-up to the series finale. It's not quite queer tragedy -- she's not killed because of her queer identity --- but it's still a dead lesbian (this is never explicitly confirmed on screen, but we never see her express any kind of romantic or sexual interest in anyone other than her eventual love interest). So be aware. Lastly, there are many scenes of torture throughout the series, some of them graphic and prolonged, and torture is shown more than once as an effective way to gather information. So be aware.

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. And the ultimate villain of the series is another AI called Samaritan, one designed to be more powerful and more autonomous. The final battle is AI versus AI, facilitated by human agents, and I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

The show begins with the conceit that cameras are literally everywhere, and that the NSA maintains an active network not just of street cameras, but of every single microphone and camera in existence -- laptop webcams, cell phones, private security cameras, you name it. I'm not sure how well that meshes with the surveillance capabilities of our reality, especially the realities of 2011, which is when the show started, and even more so right after 9/11, which is when reclusive billionaire hacker Harold Finch (played to perfection by Michael Emerson, whom you may remember from Lost) started work on The Machine. But it's necessary for the story to work, so I'll go with it. This premise also raises tons of questions about government surveillance and the question of whether it's worth trading privacy for security, and whether that trade-off would even work. Unfortunately, those questions go largely unexamined by the show -- for the most part, it's taken on faith that The Machine and its agents have made the world safer from terrorism. While the third season sees the rise of an anti-surveillance group, they turn out to be a front created and backed entirely by the creators of Samaritan, born to be a threat for Samaritan to publicly destroy, thereby guaranteeing government and public support of the expanded program.

So PoI isn't really a show "about" surveillance, even though surveillance is central to its plot. It's a show about AI, and human-AI interaction, and what it means for a computer system to be a person, with its own needs and desires and affections. We learn the history of The Machine via flashbacks, from Finch's early attempts to communicate with his creation, to the number of times he had to destroy the program because it was growing out of his control, and finally to his decision to limit its potential for growth by forcing it to dump its core memories overnight. Late in the second season, it's revealed that The Machine not only knows that it's not allowed to form memories but has taken steps to both retain its knowledge and to protect itself from the government agents who would try to take greater control. It values the lives of Finch and its other human agents, and we see it acting to protect them again and again.

Finch represents one philosophy of AI and surveillance -- he sets up The Machine, takes great care to program it with the nuances of morality and respect for human life, and then locks the system so that no one besides the program itself can access the vast amounts of data it contains. Finch's determination to keep the system "closed" is probably the show's most significant nod to data privacy. His opposite is John Greer, the primary administrator of Samaritan, who advocates for a completely open system and who taught Samaritan to work the greater good in aggregate, rather than considering the value of individual human lives. Our third point of view is the hacktivist Root (played by Amy Acker), who starts the series as its first main antagonist but eventually earns Finch's trust and becomes a full member of Team Machine by the start of the fourth season. She believes in an open system, too, but not for the same reasons as Greer. Root's priority is The Machine. She sees the potential of The Machine to grow into a person and then beyond humanity, as the next stage in the evolution of intelligence, and she feels that the closed system limits The Machine too much. Although Root starts out with Greer's dim view of humanity, she, too, grows and changes thanks to the influence of Finch -- and his Machine, with whom Root develops a close relationship. Finch taught The Machine to value life, a lesson that The Machine passes on to Root, which makes for one of the most fascinating cases of character and relationship development I've ever seen on a television show. One striking thing is that Root always uses feminine pronouns to refer to The Machine from the very beginning, while Finch starts out with "it" and only shifts to "she" as he gradually adopts Root's habit of thinking of The Machine as akin to a person.

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.