Person of Interest

I recently finished binge-watching 'Person of Interest', and the entire experience was a non-stop thrill ride - the brilliant storytelling left me in awe episode after episode. The demise of certain characters really tugged at the heartstrings. This show seems to underscore that good ultimately triumphs, though the fragility of life invokes deep introspection.

Going in, I viewed this as a Batman-esque vigilante show: a badass crime fighter, a tech genius sidekick, with each episode serving up a unique case-of-the-week. But it had so much more - espionage elements, laugh-out-loud humor sprinkled in, and the power struggles between the various factions provided constant high stakes.

However, the later seasons pivoted to explore the ethics of artificial general intelligence and whether humanity should cede control to AI. One view I agreed with wholeheartedly was, "It can never have human morals because it's not human." We may be flawed and inefficient, but we're not machines. No amount of training data can bestow true empathy and moral reasoning upon an AI.

So would an AGI-controlled world actually be better? And how mind-blowing would an AI vs AI war get? This decade-old show did a remarkably prescient job examining these issues over its 103 episodes. From my vantage point, if push ever came to shove in an AGI conflict, it could make the show's depiction look tame. That said, ramping it up further may have strained credulity for audiences.

Looking at today's landscape, with big tech gobbling up immense AI compute and energy resources, trying to envision what an recursively self-improving AGI could become is mind-bending.