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?

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.)

https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1733390176112800037

what do you mean exactly?

In the new AI DLSS version, 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 DLSS 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 generataed DLSS German Shephard version.

It was flawless DLSS, that actually contributed to the coherence of the plot and overall believability. Walking a 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.

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.

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.

It'll be eerily more relatable now. This show was way ahead of it's time, and damn accurate.

It's not really about hacking, but it depicted technology and hacking in an extraordinarily level of correctness.

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.

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...

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.

Nightmares.

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 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...

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.

When I watched it I thought the privacy model the AI used was dumb but it kind of makes some sense.

One of my most fav TV Serials to have come out of the West.

And of course Elias

Jim Caviezel> I don't even just vote for Trump. I love the man!

I bet he hopes Trump transactionally admires his fine ass in return.

Also, Bear deserves credit as being one of the main characters who holds it together.

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 feel like I'm being A/B tested by a broken AI.

For what it's worth, the translated Spanish reads slightly better to me than the English.

Im feeing the premis of this show is not so far off..

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

I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.

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.

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.

Fringe

LOST

Halt and Catch Fire

... 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 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.

   1. When Finch is out playing hide and seek with the machine.
   2. When the machine is apologizing to Finch, telling him that it did its best.

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.

movie Echelon isalso nice if ur into this kinda thing

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

They also anticipated the openai attack where models started using random websites as external memory

https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonOfInterest/wiki/index/

[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128194/?_ssoLoop=1

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.