Over the past few weeks, I've been watching the Person of Interest TV series. We got the disks for seasons 1, 2, and 3 from the library and watched them all. It's been a lot of fun. At the same time, I'm profoundly troubled by the show.
A central idea behind the show is that we have been safe from terrorism over the past several years due to the activity of the Machine -- an AI that can identify threats to national security and provide actionable intelligence before the threats materialize. The Machine, we are told, has foiled dozens of these threats.
The problem is that this greatly over-estimates the role of the Machine in keeping us safe. That is, the Machine does not exist and we have not had a significant terrorist attack during the show's existence. This kind of show contributes to the public's paranoia about terrorism that drives the military industrial complex.
The actual focus of each show is usually about saving the life of an individual person who is about to be murdered -- which the machine can also predict, but which the Government (you can hear the capital letter) has deemed "irrelevant". Each episode shows example after example of how global capitalism has created a system of profound inequality, that results in a handful of winners and mostly losers. But there's little examination of underlying causes: it's all about the surface features of each case.
Still, the show raises many salient questions: What are the ethics of surveillance? Of assassination? What are the dangers of creating a panoptican society? Of letting corporations control the information?
Mostly, the show is just fun. It's charming to imagine a genius billionaire super-hero that can create AIs and a well-dressed ex-secret-agent who can effortlessly beat up the bad guys, who make an unlikely team that can work together to save people against all odds.
- Steven D. Brewer's blog
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