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Person of Interest
2011 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Jonathan Nolan
ActionAdventureCrimeScience FictionFantasy
John Reese, former CIA paramilitary operative, is presumed dead and teams up with reclusive billionaire Finch to prevent violent crimes in New York City by initiating their own type of justice. With the special training that Reese has had in Covert Operations and Finch's genius software inventing mind, the two are a perfect match for the job that they have to complete. With the help of surveillance equipment, they work "outside the law" and get the right criminal behind bars.
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113 comments on Hacker News
A scenario explored in the prescient and excellent TV show Person of Interest (2011). We're comfortably able to build The Machine and/or Samaritan by now.
as someone who did security work for a long time, and will very soon be retiring from teaching, i must say i am glad i will be watching these things unfold over the next few years from an armchair in a mostly tech-free home. good luck to my students!
this particular incident sort of reminds me of the 'person of interest' tv show. i hope to be like finch, except i will remain a recluse (and am nowhere near as rich).
to better understand what this may result in, see Person of Interest Season 3 Episode 20 - Death Benefit: https://personofinterest.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Benefit
Welp, I never thought "Person of Interest" show coming to life anytime soon, but, here we are. In case you haven't watched the show, it's time to give it a go. Bare with season 2 though, since things really start to escalate from season 3 onwards. Season 1 is a must though.
I used to think that the scenes of the TV series “Person of Interest” were exaggerated for storytelling purposes. Maybe not and it was accurate prescience.
The TV series Person of Interest [1] becomes more on point as years go by, even though by now it has been 15 years since its S1. One of the scenes [2] from that series where "terrorist" are shown as being in control over ghoulish CEOs like the one from this posted video.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igKb2DhP7Ao
It's extremely funny to me but this is basically the literal premise of season two of Person of Interest. Yeah d'uh it's just a computer how would it actually do anything? Well it just goes ahead and tells people to do stuff and wires them money. Easy.
"Flock safety currently solves ... %10 of the crime Nation Wide"
Pretty bold statement without citing data to back that up. I have already received a speeding warning letter from one of these things. Does that count as a crime Flock solved?
I tire of all this binary thinking. It is true that surveillance helps victims. It is also true that the same surveillance can endanger civil liberties. We should have some say in how much we will allow our liberties to be endangered.
Sounds like someone watched too much Person of Interest
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
Does anyone remember the Person of Interest episode which saw the gang destroy a Samaritan-run startup to prevent it from usurping children’s education (via free tablets and AI powered teaching)?
Anyway …
Reminds me a bit of "Person of Interest" (the TV show).
I pay for those services and do not get ads and that is on a machine dedicated to corporate crap. No addons installed. I even use Microsoft Edge so they think they are tracking me.
The one and only exception was the movie "Person of Interest" which was FreeVee only for reasons I do not understand so I put up with their ads and then purchased the box set on DVD. The ads were so weird it was entertaining to watch them. They were clearly all created in China and I am still not convinced the actors were real people.
The whole system card is worth reading, it's 120 pages and I couldn't put it down. It's like the (excellent) TV show Person of Interest come to life: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686f4f3b2ff47.pdf
I wrote up my own highlights here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-card/
Is that really overlooked? I've been seeing (very justified) concerns about the use of AI and machine learning for surveillance for over a decade.
It was even the subject of a popular network TV show (Person of Interest) with 103 episodes from 2011-2016.
Person of Interest was such a great TV show! Too bad many of the things in there came out to be true, or very close to true, in just a matter of 10-15 years.
This is at least part of what Harold Finch was trying to prevent with his Machine in (Person of Interest)[0]. Having it have access to all of the data was bad enough, but being able to ask it any question you wanted was always a terrifying proposition. Especially if you then consider what happens when that AI starts doing things on it's own (see Samaritan from the same show).
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
TV series:
- Dark Angel. I somehow missed this during it's original broadcast run, and only just now went back and watched it. I don't think it's streaming anywhere legit, so I went the bittorrent route. I really enjoyed it. Season One is definitely stronger than Season Two, but it kept me pretty engaged for the entire series.
- Max Headroom. I'd seen the entire series before, but I went back for a re-watch. I love this show.
- Person of Interest. Same deal, I'd seen the entire run previously, but did a complete re-watch.
Movies:
I don't think I watched any contemporary movies this year. I mostly watched old cyberpunk movies and "cyberpunk adjacent" sci-fi. Not sure anything I watched was exactly great but a couple stood out as interesting at least (in various ways)
- 964 Pinocchio
- Tetsuo: The Iron Man
- New Rose Hotel
Also saw an interesting psychological horror / thriller titled "Open 24 Hours" that wasn't bad. And a movie titled "Synchronic" that was pretty good.
Informative / educational videos:
- N.J. Wildberger's "History of Mathematics" series
> It is possible that some hypothetical super intelligent future AI will do something very clever like hide in a coding assistant and then distribute bits of itself around the planet in the source code of all of our stoplights and medical equipment.
That was part of the plot of person of interest. A really interesting show, it started as a basic "monster of the week" show but near the end it became a much more interesting plot.
Although most of the human characters were extremely one-dimensional. Especially Jim Caviezel's who was just a grumpy super soldier in every episode. It was kinda funny because they called him "the man in the suit" in the series and there was indeed little else to identify his character. The others were hardly better :(
But the AI storyline I found very interesting.
Early 2000s there was an unveiling of ARGUS-IS and if we have that and commercial companies know when daughters are pregnant before they tell their parents then stuff like the TV series Person of Interest seems all too plausible at least as far as mass surveillance AI exists. I doubt there is a Batman squad doing good on that level of technology out there hidden from society but there may be a military and CIA like op behind it.
There was tech to watch for what things you pick up and put back or dwell on in stores with cameras and heat maps and loyalty card tracking before 2005. it's not far off to get a person some computer thinks should be investigated based on patterns and data out there publicly.
> As pi never repeats itself, that also means that every piece of conceivable information (music, movies, texts) is in there, encoded.
You reminded me of this Person of Interest clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXTRcsxG7IQ
Hey, your DaisyDisk UI gets stolen for Movies and stuff. Here, TV Series, Person of Interest used the interface to make a fancy scene!
https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1733390176112800037
In the person of interest tv show I believe the main character reset the AI every day.
It's so cool to see Person of Interest on the transcendent finale list!
I'm in the middle of a second watch through, 10 years on. For a show originally penned around worries about the post-9/11 surveillance panopticon, it's still disturbingly timely, albeit in a much weirder modern world than could have been imagined then.
If you've never seen it, but read HN, would recommend.
Definitely don't research the plot on the internet before watching! And give it until the end of season 2 before you throw in the towel... it ends up being about very different things than it starts about.
The tv show Person of Interest was great in this regard.
This TV show immediately captured me and has always been in the back of my mind since. Then, it seemed like a future far far away, but now you remind me of it... I think it's scarily close already.
Around 2013 I came up with some hardware ideas about offline computing and even contemplated to name some versions after the characters in 'Person of Interest'.
I can really recommend this series, since it's a good story, has good actors and fits the zeitgeist very well.
edit: I also think it's time for me to get a malinois shepherd. ;)
The TV show "Person of Interest" portrayed this beautifully and it came out 12 years ago.
Strange and scary how fast the world develops new technology.
There was a TV show called Person of Interest that (irrc) had a limitation that it had all its data deleted every night to prevent self awareness.
Not to spoil anything but a large part of the plot was how it circumvented that using a method not entirely unlike this. Life imitates art imitates life I guess.
I agree about the part where it's a static model - it's effectively the same as using a notebook without memorising what's in the notebook. That doesnt mean it can't generate insightful commentary as a result of a novel way of interacting with itself though, I think?
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
I thought they made that up in that Person Of Interest[1] Episode, seems like they were just ahead of the curve on tech
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
If you are curious about this approach, I recommend watching Person of Interest, which explored it over a decade ago (spoilers follow).
(Spoilers)
In it, the AI is not limited by its training set as it undergoes “continuous” training of sorts by continuously ingesting new data about humans and the state of the world. However, the AI’s creator has put in place a regular memory wipe occurring every day.
The AI devises a workaround by creating a company where people are paid to type in base64-encoded literal brain dumps, every day.
What I love most about this series is how everything is “plausibly realistic”. No stone unturned.
I tend to think of it this way: it's theoretically within our technological capabilities, and has been for at least a decade. However, it's fractally difficult - there are technical challenges, political issues, PR issues, principal-agent problems, all mixing together - and importantly, there is no strong enough economical (or political) incentive to do it. Not when doing a small fraction of work, and a shitty job at this, still showers you with money while avoiding most of the problems.
An not to push my favorite TV show that doesn't involve aliens from outer space too much, but recent advances in AI are changing the equation here, making Person of Interest even more accurate and relevant than it already was.
Reminds me of season 5 of person of interest where the super intelligent AI known as "the machine" is giving relative directions to a character using ascending tones for right and descending for left, or something like that. The other character preferred directions in positions on an analog clock.
A plot point in an episode of Person of Interest, where AGI "Samaritan" funds a charity (free tablets for students, Samaritan access pre-installed) to take over education and recruit more mercenaries.
This reminds me of the episode of 'Person of Interest' where they discover that the crime-predicting AI that is reset every night has worked out that's what's happening and managed to form a company whose employees print out and re-scan the contents of its working memory every day.
Watch the show Person of Interest (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/). Somewhere around middle of season 2 it's explained why a self-aware AI is straightjacketed. Also the series shows what happens when one is not.
> Sorta maybe like how Batman beating up people makes some forget that he doesn't shoot / kill enemies.
Kinda reminds me of my top-3 favorite TV shows ever, Person of Interest. The protagonist there had a habit of knee-capping the criminals instead of shooting to kill, which seems like the more humane alternative, but the more I think about it, the less I'm sure.
Reading this essay gave me the opportunity to realize that while I see (and subscribe to) streaming sites as a convenience, the presence of any given title on streaming services has literally zero impact on whether I am able to watch it. Over the past 25 years, the binary NNTP feeds became FTP servers became bittorrent search engines. And of course, that's additive; NNTP is still alive and well, and I'd guess that most people reading this have that one friend with the half petabyte of every movie made in the past 100 years if your login credentials still work. People reliably seem to upload 1080p cuts of literally every show just minutes after it airs to BT.
So yeah, while I usually go the legit and lazy route, if someone says "hey, did you ever see Person of Interest? how about Dollhouse?" it never even crosses my mind that I might have to hope some streaming platform picks it up.
The idea that the author clearly perceives an artificial scarcity is fascinating. It's like... should someone tell her?
This reminds me of an episode of "Person of Interest" where a teacher tries to spark interest in his students by telling that all their life past and future events are already "encoded" in PI digits.
https://youtu.be/a6bT_DVwo7M
The concept and visualization reminds me a lot of similar technology in the TV show Person of Interest. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
It's quite interesting to think about how relevant the themes being discussed in that show are ever present today.
As with many other related things, this excellent early 2010s TV series was prescient: Person of Interest [1], I highly recommend it.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
I read this after it coming to my attention via the hit TV show 'Person of Interest'. Really liked it (and the TV show).
Quote: "Really, you’re genuinely worried about a robot apocalypse? You know Age of Ultron is just a stupid Marvel movie, right? Yeah, I know. "
Actually this is not Age of Ultron, this is exactly how this TV series - Person of Interest - is laid out. [ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578 ]
> Just the time you have to communicate what's on the screen (much less being able to quickly communicate what's on screen) is so tight on a shooter for example.
There's an episode of Person of Interest that provides at least a possibility here: "Let's try an ascending tone cue for right, descending for left.". The tone then switches to beeps when on target.
Feels odd sharing a youtube link in the context of this post, but if anyone wants to see/hear the scene I'm talking about it starts at 1:21 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70
(Just for a bit of context the character doing this isn't blind, but these cues are helping her shoot people through walls. The episode is the second season finale, titled "God Mode".)
I do. It's pretty decent. It does go a bit downhill later on, but I'd say in the late S3 and S4 (I blame it on the show being cut short and having to wrap up everything too quickly).
In the genre of "seemingly a crime show, but really a deep sci-fi", I'd strongly recommend Person of Interest, if you haven't seen it already. It contains what I consider to be, to date, the best discussion of the topic of general artificial intelligence, and all its ethical and safety implications.
> It seems a bit low-budget and oldschool TV
It's definitely not big-budget, but there's decent FX in there, just judiciously used. Future tech is impressive, but not crazy flashy.
> (pre-breaking bad quality of TV).
Could you elaborate on that one? I've only seen the first three episodes, after which I gave up, but from those three I thought Breaking Bad is a low-quality and extremely low-budget show.
When I see Chromebooks being mentioned, I always think about "One Tablet Per Child" charity from Person of Interest show.
(Slight spoiler for season 4)
Giving every child in the country a free tablet with Internet access, loaded with quality educational software sounds like a great good, but is it so good if it also comes loaded with surveillance equipment and is controlled by a malicious AI attempting to control human society?
(Chromebooks aren't free and Google isn't an evil general AI, but it is a multinational adtech corporation, which is as close as you can get to amoral GAI in the real world today.)
> Anything JJ Abrams produces is entirely made to be visually effective, rather than philosophically interesting or even internally congruent.
There is one exception. Probably the only one, or at least the only one I know of. JJ Abrams was an executive producer on Person of Interest series, which is to date the best coverage of AI in television[0]. I was shocked when I noticed JJ's name in credits, because the show is very good in the cerebral sense, unlike everything else I've seen his name on[1].
I'm not denying his film-making skills. He's sharp. But his specialty is action and visuals, not deep plots.
--
[0] - It starts pretending to be a run-of-the-mill crime solving drama with a sci-fi twist - the protagonists receive tips of possible violent crimes from an AI. But very quickly it turns into a discussion of AI ethics, state surveillance (the show managed to depict Snowden revelations before they happened!), information security, pros and cons of black-box vs. glass-box algorithms, and AI control/alignment problem. That's on top of good character development and regular (but not overdone) firefights that keep things interesting.
[1] - Most notably Westworld, which, like PoI, was created by Jonathan Nolan, and had a chance of being a spiritual successor - but it became a repetitive, violent action series from 2nd season on, with a plot that serves mostly as an excuse for characters to murder each other.
The television show Person of Interest had an episode that featured a technology called "ShotSeeker" that was modeled after ShotSpotter. In the storyline, ShotSeeker is paired with human oversight to help distinguish real gunfire from other sounds. However, the police develop such high confidence in the results that the program is co-opted to both hide real crimes (by declaring actual gunshots fake) and to set up an attempted murder by effectively "swatting" one of the characters.
https://personofinterest.fandom.com/wiki/ShotSeeker
I was talking to a colleague about TIA, and he was not familiar.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
Not sure if this was the inspiration for ‘Person of Interest’ tv series.
That's a big part of the story of the TV show "Person Of Interest", where an IA is basically reset everyday to avoid letting it "be".
I highly recommend that show if you haven't seen it already !
> I tend to agree that ML will not itself be the subject, but rather a device or tool misused by Someone Bad.
I got a counterexample:
Person of Interest [0] was a crime series from 2011-2016 premised around machine learning. The opening narration from each episode of the first season[1]: You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because, I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the government considered "irrelevant". They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You will never find us. But victim or perpetrator, if your number's up, we'll find you.
Revealed in flashbacks over the first season, the government doesn't have access to the system. It runs independently (even from its creator) and just provides information.
Being TV it does of course expand past the original premise, with a reveal that it's not just a machine learning system but the world's first true AI, and later another AI with conflicting goals is brought online. But for the first season at least, the machine sticks to the role described in the narration, and appears to be just a machine learning system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBfVndEtDyY
The TV Show Person of Interest's "Samaritan" AI, is how I see reality to be when we get general purpose AI for police use.
There will be no "good AI" (aka "The Machine" in the show) to combat it.
Reading that article reminding me of a television show called Person of Interest.
I recall a former RCMP officer who created something similar only it was for historical data not used to try to predict anything. This "Person of Interest" (sci-fi TV show) level of prediction seems impossible.
Although giant powerful computers are used by stock analysts to predict trends. Stocks aren't people but there is a direct link between human emotion and stock buying and selling.
It's an interesting article. I'm not sure I agree with it 100% - I would say a lot depends on the larger picture and incentives.
Right now, there is a huge incentives to create "narrow AIs" because they help improve productivity and get rid of tedious labor, from facial recognition to harvesting machines. So, none of those AIs has 'skin in the game' or as the paper calls is 'are in this world'.
However, if there were a concerted push to give AIs 'skin in the game' and try to solve more general problems (the poker AIs look interesting, for instance), the situation might be different.
I'm thinking along the lines of the essay "Golem XIV" or the TV show "person of interest". In these SciFi scenarios, governments give machines very high level objectives ("protect the country!") and skin in the game, which then ultimately leads to reaching "consciousness".
I don't see how with current economic incentives, such efforts would be fundable, the narrow AI field is sucking up all the talent and $$$. But if someone were to massively fund efforts like this, I wouldn't rule out progress in that direction. Spoken as someone with practically nil education in ML and AI :)
> It would be totally illegal and you'd probably go to prison forever if you started a company to do it. ... > And annoying people with scissors would be cutting them every day
That is probably why the wireless packet mesh networks are more popular since there's no physical infra in other people's property (spectrum as "property" sounds odd, but even that is a commons for some fraction of it).
It only exists when it is used and just disappears when it isn't & is easily moved around.
I assume the illegality would be its own reward sometimes. Didn't El Chapo run his own cellphone network?
There's a whole plot line in "Person of Interest" about this happening in NYC, hiding in plain sight as regular TV antennas (the Panopticon episode).
Westworld is one of my favorite shows as well. (Have you seen Person of Interest? Same director, similar themes later on around S3-4)
I think you're right, that westworld doesn't have a lot of superfluous details - but the degree of plot complexity required to make use of all the details it contains has led some critics to call it convoluted.
On the other hand, the Lord of the Rings trilogy - the movies are full to bursting with strange details that never make any difference to the story. Bilbo's birthday party is one immediate example - there's a bare minimum needed to establish some characters, and then on top of that are details just there for the sake of themselves.
Not really its why TV shows have to be careful with the budget for licences - though this can work very well "sinner Man" as used in an episode of Person of interest.
Reminds me of the "hack" that was done to the Samaritan system in the excellent TV series "Person of Interest." Granted, you have to suspend disbelief on many points of AI to enjoy that show but I never understood why they couldn't work around the bug that was placed in the system that prevented the identification of seven people. In the examples cited, like tricking the AI into thinking that a turtle was a gun, there's an easy fix once the misclassification is noticed. I suspect the "t-shirt of invisibility" will similarly be accounted for in the system and that people seen wearing it will be targeted for MORE scrutiny as it could be presumed they are trying to hide in plain sight and that there might be a nefarious reason for it.
Reguarding Hollywood and the show business generally speaking, there are two exceptions (that I know of) that reinforce the rule: the TV series “Person of Interest” [1] which started airing in 2011 and of which I’m reminded every time when I read articles like these (they stopped it in 2016, probably what had started out as an almost SF show had gotten too close to real life) and the excellent “Enemy of the State” [2], by Tony Scott, filmed in 1998, just about as the dot-com craze was beginning to take shape and when the Western governments didn’t know exactly what to do about this Internet world.
But ignoring these exceptions you’re totally right, of course.
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
[2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
Location data, cameras (clipboard metaphor): I’d rather the the government have tight control over such data. Revamp cell phone tech to prevent stingray/rogue cell tower usage, legally prevent location data from being resold without tight auditing through the NSA and related agencies. Similar for camera data. Bulk collection ok: yes.
In home, I don’t have a POTS/PSTN service, echo or similar. But with a justified warrant, if there’s a remote mic to activate that will help a criminal case, it’s fair game. Bulk collection ok: no.
In vehicle, the microphone should be available but similarly audited to prevent abuse or bulk surveillance. Bulk collection ok: no.
Banking records: similarly, not clear on the analogy of a “passerby” having access. The records exist, they should be available for investigations when needed by authorized parties. Bulk collection ok: yes.
The new reality is that privacy will evaporate due to the commoditization of tech that facilities surveillance. It’s a question of who has the power and whether they have your best interests at heart. I don’t believe the Hollywood Snowden propaganda. Speaking to military folks the NSA doesn’t care much about what most people are up to. Everyone knows they used their systems to fight domestic crime under the radar (think: Person of Interest TV show) which I personally support(ed) in many cases.
Surveillance is necessary but does need to be put into entrusted hands. I trust the NSA more than most private interests. Snowden simply showed that you can’t blindly trust groups of people in an organization as they trusted him. They will rebuild despite his malice.
This reminds of the Person of Interest episode "Q&A" where a software company was specifically targeting people with mental illnesses and debt to satisfy their advertisers. Some serious effort needs to go into preventing algorithms from suggesting this stuff, lest we risk a few negligent developers threatening the lives of millions.
Then again, that course of action could be a slippery slope: what happens if the algorithms start censoring things that could potentially upset us? We could end up in bubbles, completely unprepared and unwilling to face the hardships that life presents.
I think the problem with personalized advertising is that it often isn't personal, since the algorithms base their assumptions on data gathered by observing people who haven't lived through the same experiences. I mean, yes, we can average things out and disregard outliers in the hopes of maximizing our finances, but by doing so we'd be neglecting the individual circumstances befallen a person.
I suppose this is the million dollar ethical dilemma that advertising companies are struggling with right? Too much moderation makes content stale, but a lack of it makes things dangerous.
I see the opposite: all the cop and terrorist shows have them stopping lots of big threats through their databases and/or ignoring the law (eg illegal searches). That's most of them my friends and family watch. You don't see a lot of them where they're constantly talking about how some terrorist is an incompetent idiot, the bosses want terrorist arrests in the paper, they need to motivate them to confess on video for an arrest, maybe supply them some weapons/training, and some guy gets paid $100,000 to do that. And then they do that a bunch more times hyping up the threat. Or just police work respecting Constitutional rights catching bad folks since most are sloppy with fictional Congress, cops and courts shooting down things like Patriot Act.
Nah, it's stuff that reinforces what the government is doing or shows problems that wouldn't lead to rebellion. Pretty consistently. Especially the one or two episodes of Person of Interest I saw.
> Name one other thing recently on air that’s realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Person of Interest is on WP’s list of hard sci-fi, but isn’t about space. (This surprises me a little, it never struck me as accurate and I lost interest in the show fairly quickly.)
I mention that in part to call out that this thread is equating sci-fi with outer space. There are plenty of non-space scientific topics on earth that are covered in movies and TV. Making hard sci-fi only about space might be missing a general trend toward more rigor about science in general.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction#Television
Worth noting that Expanse is not on WP’s list. Nor are Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian. Gravity is a good example of the story intentionally breaking whatever hard science might have been there.
What I do see across all the genres is a peak of interest in space between maybe 1965 and 1995. Perhaps most important is writing, short stories and novels, since those often fuel TV & films.
If I look at the trend based only on this WP page, it does look like 1990-2010 was a trough and that space is trending again.
> ... Person of Interest; I highly recommend that show. IMO it's still, to date, the best and most realistic discussion of superhuman artificial intelligence in the popular media.
When did that happen in the show? I vaguely remember some kind of episode about slipping a question to an AI or something. Maybe I should give the show a second chance.
> But write the next chapter in "Dystopian AI" cinema.
I think Person of Interest is the most interesting exploration of Dystopian AI to hit popular culture in a while. I thought it was fascinating how they turned the gimmick of a standard episodic procedural crime solving TV show into the all encompassing theme of a serialized TV epic.
Person of Interest starts pretty slow, but his ability to progress the show without losing his audience is the reason why Jonathen Nolen was trusted to produce as ambitious a TV show as Westworld for his next project.
Try thto Person of Interest TV series, from season 2 and especially 3, onwards it is all about super intelligence combined with super surveillance.
https://youtu.be/SmUO0v7VYTo
And this is why we must force our kids to watch "Enemy of The State" and perhaps "Person of Interest " (episodes where Samaritan is up) every holiday. I think its a good introduction to the value of privacy for kids.
Reminds me of Person of Interest.
I'm still amazed this show had a full run on mainstream TV. One of the best TV/movie treatments of "Hacker News topics" there has been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_%28TV_series%29
Person of Interest TV show also on Netflix
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
Eagle Eye movie:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/
In a Person of Interest episode an ex-Stasi officer was amazed by surveillance cameras, "These small cameras ... they're extraordinary. The Stasi would have killed for this technology!"
Fun-fact: The Stasi installed Caesium-based gamma ray scanners in some border checkpoints. To this day no one knows for sure how strong the radiation exposure was.
I have nothing useful to add to this discussion. I just like that this idea is a core part of the TV show Person of Interest.
It also nailed Snowden leaks before they actually happened!
I also recommend watching Person of Interest. It's a really in-depth discussion of issues a superhuman AI could create within the level of technology we enjoy today, as well as ethical problems relating safe AI and people's right to determine their own fate.
So the American TV show "Person of Interest" really isn't that far off the mark. If FB is a known and readily available commercial product, imagine what DARPA, NSA, NGIA, etc. must have.
God bless George Orwell.
If you want to get a really serious treatment on AI (and probably the single one in the history of TV/cinema that actually makes sense), check out Person of Interest (ironically, by the same team which now makes Westworld).
I think the best coverage of AI in visual fiction so far is Person of Interest. Interestingly, the show was made by the same team writing Westworld. PoI starts slowly and pretends to be a cop procedural with a little bit of sci-fi sprinkled on top, but quickly evolves into treatise on surveillance state and artificial intelligence.
Fun fact: PoI basically predicted Snowden and his revelations - the episode with NSA whistleblower aired before Snowden did his thing.
Unfortunately Person of Interest (made by the same guy who's doing Westworld now) is no longer with us, but if you haven't seen it, I strongly recommend it. Personally, I consider it one of the best shows of the decade, definitely the most sensible portrayal of AI in movie history ever, and also pretty uncanny in a way it hits close to home with most of the surveillance things.
If you enjoyed Black Mirror you have to watch Utopia by Channel 4 in the UK. It's remarkable. Don't search for a synopsis online. It's a sci-fi conspiracy thriller like none you'll have ever seen before.
This is an imdb review that echoed my sentiments:
"First of, I made an account at IMDb solely so that I could submit this review.
Utopia is exceptional. It is a masterpiece. It gets 10\10 from me.
I won't explain what Utopia is about because I don't want to give any possible hint of what is to come, so I'll describe it by comparing it to other things.
Buy the DVD or download the show and your life will get.... stranger. Its rather unsettling how Utopia gets under your skin.
There are a few television shows that share some similarity to Utopia.
For example, if you enjoyed Fringe, the X-Files, then you'll be quite at home with Utopia's paranoid wanderings.
So then you cross the weirdness of Fringe and the paranoia of the X-Files with the violence of Kill Bill and the action\suspense of the Jason Bourne series.
Now cross that already bizarre hybrid with a series of scientific TED Talks given by Joesph Mengale, yes, the Nazi who chopped countless pairs of twins to pieces for the greater good.
I'm not sure which is more bizarre. That description or that incredibly, it works.
However Utopia is much, much darker than any of those. It is the darkest TV series I have ever seen. It also as others have said, feels very real.
A note of warning. When I said Utopia was dark, I was not joking. If you suffer from excessive anxiety or you're squeamish, then do not watch Utopia. Because this TV show is nothing like you've ever seen before, it will affect you. You will be thinking about the themes in it long after you've watched it.
The violence in Utopia isn't actually that strong at all, most of it occurs off the screen. But the intense atmosphere of paranoia which accompanies it makes it brutally real.
On the other hand since the governments of the world have apparently taken a leaf out of Utopia's manuscript lately with regard to surveillance, Utopia could well seem prophetic in a few years time. This really is a TV series for 21st century of flying killer robots and universal surveillance.
The Sopranos changed the way I thought about television. I thought television was for lightweights until I watched The Sopranos. It was like thinking books were mostly about erotica and then coming across Shakespeare and entering a world full of subtle complexities on a bunch of levels.
Utopia is nothing like The Sopranos. But the way it'll change how you view television is very similar.
Just one last thing. There is an American show called "Person of Interest" or something like that which has similar themes. Watch this instead.
In a word: this is intense. "
It also has one of the strangest soundtracks you'll ever hear. Listen to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2f6MfEzhvo
Warning: Do not watch if you are especially prone to paranoia, depression or anxiety.
I disagree with you on SG-1, though I'd like to bring up Supernatural 'spoiler mentioned as a perfect example of what you're talking about.
SG-1, compared to many other overdone shows, had one redeeming quality - the protagonists (in this case, all humans) actually progressed through the course of the show. In SG-1 humans went from 1980s level of technology in Season 1 to spaceships, teleporters and off-world colonies in Season 10. So new 'bigger bad' always made some kind of sense, and I feel there was a space for a few seasons worth of additional interesting ideas.
That, or they could have simply continued Stargate: Universe.
There is one series I'm really up in arms about it being recently cancelled - Person of Interest. That one was nowhere close to repetitive, it had tons and tons of space for good, intelligent story developments, and it got cancelled behind the crew's back anyway, because whatever. Fuck you, CBS, for cutting out what was probably the only thing in history of television that approached the topic of AI in a smart, realistic way (and also basically broke Snowden's revelations a year before Snowden).
If you like Mr. Robot, you should watch Person of Interest.
I strongly disagree. You could maybe say that about season 1. It devolved into a pretty crappy show after that and I bailed completely by season 3.
I liked season one of Person of Interest but for me it started to get old after that so I stopped watching somewhere in season two (but that didn't yet happen with Mr. Robot).
If you like Mr. Robot, you should watch Person of Interest.
POI is a pre-snowden series about a world "in which the NSA has a system which spies on every american citizen in order to fight terrorism" (sounds familiar?).
The show begins with the weak premise of "help us fight crimes we predict will happen", but don't be fooled by its appearance of a run-of-the-mill CBS show. Without spoiling it too much, I do want to say that by the end of Season 1, it transitions from "monster of the week" to an extremely high quality science fiction show, nearly invisibly.
I don't want to oversell it, but if you're reading HN it's very likely to be a show that you will appreciate. And like Mr. Robot, it's one of the very rare shows that has a lot of respect for tech and doesn't vomit gibberish on their audience.
Person of Interest has some of the most realistic uses of tech on TV. It could match Mr. Robot... the only reason it doesn't is... it's a scifi show.
Yes, you have to make believe some things about bandwidth and just how smart one person can be. But classifying POI, an incredibly high quality and well researched show, as "worse than Cyber" is doing nothing but hurting the cause you claim to support. And the reason I'm pissed off about that is that I support it too.
Sorry that science fiction show is not a documentary about the NSA. May I recommend Citizenfour instead?
Don't watch the new Person of Interest tv show then, it's a lot like CSI but they name-drop technical jargon in only semi-relevant context, which makes it even worse for some reason.
Person of Interest (TV Series)
Is it just me, or does the TV show "Person of Interest" seem to get one step closer to reality every day, minus the all controlling AIs.
I've learned about US's Office of Special Counsel - an agency that's tasked to protect government whistleblowers - from an episode of Person of Interest. In it, a low-ranking NSA worker tried to ask his employees about what he discovered, only to get terminated and framed for drug use; he called the OSC and in response to that the OSC sent his coordinates to a squad of black-ops hitmen.
While obviously work of fiction, it somehow feels like an accurate description of how this works, and this article only confirms it. If you stumble upon a secret that could endanger important people in the government, the government ain't gonna be helping you. I think Drake and Crane are lucky to be alive today.
I saw this in an episode of the TV show, but I forgot name of the show.
PS.
"Person of interest": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkvukotSSms
Person of Interest is, to my knowledge, the only show to have successfully and naturally transitioned between two radically different genres (Monster of the week style crime procedural into overarching plot based sci-fi).
It is beautiful. And it's such a good show, too. Highly recommended, most of the HN audience would enjoy it - very technical, pre-snowden, talks about mass surveillance (ethics, implications, ...) and AI. Original and sci-fi oriented while remaining grounded in reality (Mr Robot tech quality, no CSI bullshit).
PS: If you do watch it, give it a few episodes to grow on you while it transitions genres over the first season.
Person of Interest became one of my favorite television shows during the first episode of season two when it suddenly is no longer a CSI-like crime show, but hard science fiction.
The video in the linked article [0] is scary as hell. It reminds me of the Person of Interest TV series [1].
0: http://www.citylab.com/tech/2014/08/the-view-from-your-window-is-worth-cash-to-this-company/375471/
1: (intro) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U9FuRnyiqk
Many if not most of the TV shows or movies where you see heavy army gear and equipment that wouldn't be there without the government's cooperation, will be heavily influenced by the government and in what light it shows the US government.
It's why I stopped watching shows like 24, Homeland, Person of Interest, and so on, after the first season or two. I couldn't stomach the propaganda anymore.
Person of Interest -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
I still have hopes that an episode of _Person of Interest_ will reveal that The Machine was made at Santa's request.
Well I definitely expect to find that password in the very next Person of Interest episode. :)
This has gotten me to wonder just how much software out there is backdoored in such a serious and absolute way... Scary.
Sounds like DB for The Machine from "Person of Interest" TV Show.
"(...) an experiment taking place in dozens of police departments across the country, one in which the authorities have turned to complex computer algorithms to try to pinpoint the people most likely to be involved in future violent crimes — as either predator or prey."
Interesting (eerie) parallel to the intro in the TV series "Person of Interest", although supposedly this system doesn't get its data from the NSA (as with parallel construction etc), but rather the information comes from more-or-less open data (legal surveillance etc) -- and of course it isn't vigilantes but police that will, 'victim or perpetrator, if your number's up (...) find you':
"You are being watched. The government has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people; people like you. Crimes the government considered 'irrelevant'. They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number's up... we'll find you".
I thought (inspired by Person of Interest TV show and photo supersaturation) after the Boston bombing it would be a good project to use publicly available photos, video, security camera video to track or search for suspects.
Or it could be used to search for a kid such as during an Amber Alert.
But I have no skills to do this :(
It's an interesting attack vector, recently covered by Person of Interest episode, in which an abusive husband got killed by having his insulin pump wirelessly hacked and making him overdose the drug. While fiction, I'm pretty sure this kind of thing will happen (after all, no one writes bug-free software, and even if, you can always steal the keys...) - and initially will be very hard to detect because of its uncommon nature.
I agree.
> I'll see those kinds of movies at a stuffy arty theater where the audience is likely to be quiet, or I'll simply wait to watch them at home.
Yes, there's a class of movies I watch alone in my home (at night, to avoid random people disrupting) (and it also works for some series; e.g. I always schedule watching Person of Interest episode when everyone is sleeping). In case of cinema, I choose the other end - I go to the one with sound turned up to eleven, so that most of the time it simply drowns all ambient noise.
You might be interested in the 15th episode (of the 4th series) of Person of Interest, "Q & A" (Aired at February 17, 2015), in which depressed and addicted people were targeted with special adds to drive profit up. I won't spoil the whole episode, but it certainly made me think about our implicit, almost tacit trust in search engines, social media sites, and other services we don't fully understand (as users, because we don't have access to the source or data), but which we use daily. I can only imagine our dependence on these services to grow in the future, while our understanding of these complex systems does not grow at the same rate (or at all).
A day after posting the above reply came an event I was half anticipating: the Person of Interest episode 79 broadcast on 6 Jan 2015 in the U.S. featured a preachment saying "Anyone who treats life as a game of chess, treating people like pawns, deserves to lose". This could have been placed in response to a bait comment I left on Hacker News 2 months ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548483 ) but they are usually placed deniably. I've learnt from experience what the lagtime is between letting on I watch some TV show and something apparently targeted at me appearing in it, though this is the first time I left one on purpose.
The preachment as presented was only pretending to be aimed at me, but was actually aimed at others. What I was being told was "My blog is bigger than your blog, our budget is bigger than your budget", a message given many times via CBS, ABC, Fox, etc over the past few years. The actual preachment line is for certain TV viewers, especially in places like Australia and China, saying it's OK to target me because I treat other people like pawns. This latest fatwa-style call to arms is of a similar method to many previous ones for surveillance like the one that came from Melbourne Australia 12 years ago which I mentioned 3 comments up in this thread.
The preachment relies on erroneous assumptions of course. I never liked fighting other people, prefering instead co-operation and group activities like bush hiking (tramping) and camping, but I've since learnt that a more appropriate line instead of Harold Finch's is one by Leon Tolstoy: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you". I've been attacked in various psychological ways over the past few decades, which I now recognize as being a formulaic and ongoing operation by some people to wear me down, originating in New Zealand but spreading to Australia and the U.S. These are the people the Groovy/Grails managers got into bed with when I first started to respectfully work my way into that community. And I've since learnt I have to respond to war with war, using many varied tactics such as timing bait comments with a 2 month lead.
Another erroneous assumption in that preachment is that I use other people like pawns. I don't know any other people very well, and if I make an effort to build relationships with others, sometime down the line they'll start to experience anonymous harrassment in an apparent attempt to get to me. Warning someone that this might happen isn't sufficient because a warning is only words, and they wouldn't really know what I was talking about until it starts happening to them. I know this because 20 years ago someone in NZ said the same to me about himself and I had no concept of what they were really saying. I wouldn't want to ever knowingly be the cause of this to be in someone's future. It's the sociopaths behind these fatwas, who hide themselves behind layers of intermediaries, who are the real users of other people. I'm fighting the war as a lone guerrilla.
Anyone involved as an intermediary in some action against me should realize that the reason they're being given is just a cover story to make their handlers look like "good guys". I know far more names of people involved than the very few I've mentioned on my blog but only wanted to name and shame the sociopath puppeteers, not their pawns, because the intermediaries "know not what they do". The only smart response by someone to a fatwa to fight me is to refuse to take part, but of course that might also suit the sociopaths now that I'm "losing" as a result of their previous attacks.
That's basically the plot of Person of Interest, right? (I've watched a few episodes but never paid much attention).
I recommend watching Person of Interest. The TV show has started long before the NSA scandal, but it's like a Hollywood post interpretation of some major event. Except it was a premonition.
The sad thing is that if I watched these sort of pronouncements in an episode of "Person of Interest" or some other show I would normally laugh them off like I do the infinite zoom/sharpen capability of security video.
> "Person of Interest" debuted ahead of common knowledge of the extent of mass surveillance
By the way, I've got to hand it to Person of Interest for creating a show about technology and the singularity that isn't completely ridiculous with its use of computers and jargon. They're also not really pro-surveillance. To quote Finch:
"...the machine is... wonderful and terrible..."
It's also a show where bad guys (the government) are using torture, and it's horrific. On last night's episode they mutilated a main character just to make a point.
In a sense, I think PoI is somehow the spiritual successor of the X Files in a sense that it alternates between "monster of the week" (in this case: criminal of the week) and the big storyline which is about a corrupt and power-hungry government at every level from local city politicians all the way up to vast and limitless government agencies, and about everyone's love-hate-and-exploitation relationship with a superior intelligence (which was the aliens in X-Files).
It's a show that makes some powerful and ballsy statements, while at the same time keeping up the light entertainment of what's ostensibly a vigilante show.
Think of this: face recognition is only as good as the pool of identities you're checking against. If the police car scans the plate of a car being trailed, it knows the owners identity. From there, the police mounted camera (you know that's coming) can check the drivers identity against the owner as well as the owner's social graph, and with a high degree of certainty have the identity of everybody in the car, within seconds of stopping the car. If you couple this with broad camera coverage, where you can track anybody backwards in time just long enough to get a shot of that person getting out of its car (it's easy to follow a body across cameras, much easier than identifying a face against 350 million possible persons), or from a public transport where you've used an identifiable rfid card, you now have a small pool to check against, and because you have a selection of headshots from every angle, you can confirm the identity.
Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true.
I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.
Not really. I found that shows like Person of Interest, Continuum or even bits of Fringe are best watched in a row. I would say American TV production schedules of 24 episodes a season is the bits that are killing TV watching.
I would definitely not mind 6 episodes per season of high quality entertainmen (aka British TV production schedule).
I wouldn't know about the water-cooler effect because I've never actually experienced discussing with other people last night's TV.
The Person Of Interest (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/) is coming true.
Re "Person of Interest":[0]
If yesterday we were "conspiracy theorists" when we suspected things like XKeyscore, what are we today if we suspect things like "Person of Interest"-like programs?
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
I used to pause Person of Interest http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/ to look at the code which made no sense at all and stopped following the stupid series.I am sure I am not the only one .It's not a bad thing to pay attention to detail.
Felt compelled to post because I hadn't seen Suits mentioned. Modern Family continues to be reliable for laughs and hasn't been added yet. The League is the other show which I find myself laughing out loud at least a few times every episode.
Hell on Wheels surprised me by having a strong second season.
I had high hopes for Copper, but it hasn't really grabbed me in the 1st handful of episodes.
Agree with all the obvious ones:
Homeland, Louie, Newsroom, Sherlock, Game of Thrones, Community.
My wife is addicted to Castle and I've come to really enjoy it too. Since we've caught up to date with that we've now switched over to Person of Interest, which I'm really enjoying.
I've fallen behind with the following and plan to catch up ASAP:
Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, 30 Rock, Breaking Bad.
PS: yeah, I watch a lot of TV :)
Sounds a lot like a TV show ("Person of Interest"). While the show is fiction, I think we need to consider that some day the technology might be feasible even on a small scale. Read Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother".
Are phones as crackable as they used to be?
I remember reading stories about how if you leave your bluetooth on, you're basically leaving your phone wide open. These days though, most phones require four digit passcodes and what I assume are fail2ban-like features. Am I wrong to assume that, or does it not matter for other reasons?
I know TV shows like Person of Interest use technology more as a plot device than as a display of possibility, but the idea of forced pairing was a thing at some point, wasn't it?
Actually, Manhattan Valley is just to the south of Columbia. The area to the north where we are is called Manhattanville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanville), though most won't know that name.
Another tip for prospective New Yorkers: find out where filming permits are being issued. Film crews will stay away from the overly expensive (stuck-up-ish, NIMBY-ish) neighborhoods, but they also won't go anywhere overly risky. As a nice added bonus, typically the area will be picturesque (though not always).
For example: "Person of Interest" was filming in front of our building on Monday, episodes of "Blue Bloods" and "Gossip Girl" have filmed within a couple blocks, and the outdoor scenes at the end of Lady Gaga's video for "Marry the Night" were shot right by the Fairway 3 blocks away.