Fun fact: PoI basically predicted Snowden and his revelations - the episode with NSA whistleblower aired before Snowden did his thing.
I tried PoI myself and couldn't get through it, because it was just so dull -- run-of-the-mill low budget procedural with that glossy network-TV feeling of Hollywood reality to it (e.g., everyone in the show looks like a model, except eggheads or villains, where they're allowed to cast someone unattractive).
Several people have told me it gets much better, but I just don't want to have to wade through all the mediocre episodes.
No idea how good the list is or how well it works.
What's the current primary use for machine learning? Determining consumer behavior? Guessing at which ads to display?
The character played by Hopkins tried his hardest to keep the technology within the park. That seems pretty odd at first but his reasons to do so are stated explicitly in the final episode.
Many people try to get the technology out but they all seem to have failed so far.
I don't doubt that that would be a very real consideration, a pressure out there in the world that anyone developing AI would have to contend with.
I think the problem is with treating this like an inevitability. You are always going to deal with the idiosyncracies of the world: personalities, motivations, contingent world circumstances.
And beyond that, I think we have to keep in mind that this is, after all, fiction. The writers may arbitrarily structure their world in a manner that puts a spotlight on things they feel are interesting. And, within the limits of that spotlight, they may consider things like artificial intelligence in a way that is sincere to the subset of futurist considerations they are interested in investigating. And perhaps that involves suppressing plausible forces we would expect to see, such as military and corporate interest in advanced AI tech.
Can't imagine the character played by A. Hopkins would even pick up a phone call from military.
edit: In fact half the time tech moves in the opposite direction. Going onto the internet to argue that potentially civilization-changing technology won't be used largely for entertainment because it'll end up exclusively owned by government shows a profound lack of awareness.
We can say that the vast majority of living beings on Earth do not seem to seek any form of radical self improvement beyond ordinary developmental learning and mastery of survival skills. There is no intrinsic reason that there must be an impulse to exceed oneself. Why would AI be different?
AI's, like humans, need a purpose. The best way of achieving that purpose is by self improvement so any AI which does not self improve to some extent will be replaced by another that will. Just like humans who don't care to self improve eventually don't reproduce enough to spread their genes.
An alien AI, on the other hand, would most likely be incomprehensible to us, at least until we understood the aliens that created it.
It's almost as though it's science fiction...
Then there's Sci-Fi that's actually beleivable - like The Martian - I'm OK with this as well.
But then there's this pseudo-sciency trying to look serious while actually being BS part like Interstellar, The Arrival, etc. The main point of science there is not to be a fictional setting but trying to give a feeling of realism trough sci/techbabble. I don't even mind cheap sci-fi drama movies, for example I liked The Fountain, but when they try to pretend they are realistic that's what breaks the immersion for me completely because I start to critically evaluate the plot and it just falls apart.
I think you missed the point entirely of the films you mentioned
If they were capable of that level of AI they would have reached exponential growth shortly - to suggest someone would use it to build theme parks is downright retarded.
Like you said - AI is a plot device in that show, just another form of "magic" that lets them ramble on about consciousness while pretending to be sciency.