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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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".
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.
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.
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.
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 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?!”.
And then in season 2 I was like “woah…”.
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 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.
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.
movie Echelon isalso nice if ur into this kinda thing
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.
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 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 ...).
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.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN1sGIqdSUA
https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonOfInterest/wiki/index/
[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128194/?_ssoLoop=1
I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First they control you, and if you try to raise against them, you're erased
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.)
Also, with all AI developments happening since past few years, the show has started to feel like a documentary.
Did you know Domain Awareness is an American company?
One of my most fav TV Serials to have come out of the West.
And of course Elias
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.
Nightmares.
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"
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 feel like I'm being A/B tested by a broken AI.
Also Samaritan AI when.
(and it’s partly the same dog too)
When I watched it I thought the privacy model the AI used was dumb but it kind of makes some sense.
It's not really about hacking, but it depicted technology and hacking in an extraordinarily level of correctness.
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.
Uninspired as they might be as literary devices, drug abuse and cheating are common themes in actual human existence.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It'll be eerily more relatable now. This show was way ahead of it's time, and damn accurate.
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.
Im feeing the premis of this show is not so far off..
https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1733390176112800037
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
Fringe
LOST
Halt and Catch Fire
PoI
... And you're good...
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.
what do you mean exactly?
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.
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.
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.