Person of Interest got AI right, and we'd better start paying attention

CREATED BY STEFFI LEWIS Published: 06/02/2026 @ 09:00AM #PersonOfInterest #SciFi #AmazonPrime #AI #TheMachine #Samaritan

I've just finished watching five seasons of 'Person of Interest' on Amazon Prime, and like all the best sci-fi, it didn't really feel like fiction by the end. It felt like a profound warning wrapped in a really solid story ...

Person of Interest, Got AI right, thrilling tale, Technology's might

On the surface, it's a show about surveillance, crime prevention, and shadowy government programmes. Underneath, it's a philosophical argument about the future of artificial intelligence, and more importantly, what kind of future we want to live in.

It starts with Harold Finch, creating an AI to help the USA protect itself from terrorist attacks!

The project was kicked off after 9/11, and the AI he created hooked into all camera feeds, phones, and email accounts, and analysed who posed a threat to national security. Harold also trained it on the quirks of humanity and our sometimes unpredictable behaviours. He would go out into the world, doing ordinary things in full view of a camera with an audio feed so he could converse with his creation.

He often played chess with it so it would understand that the world is complicated, there are many rules, but human life is not just a game that needs winning.

Harold was so worried about the US government using his creation for nefarious purposes, he locked down 'The Machine' so it would only spit out ID numbers for those it considered needed watching based on the patterns and connections it saw. They could be a victim or a villain; we never know at the start of an episode, but they needed investigating nevertheless. He also hid it away so the government couldn't find it and modify it. They just got numbers from it.

However, Harold realised that some of the numbers The Machine was spitting out were not just those of terrorists, but of ordinary people that the government considered irrelevant (so wouldn't look into), but still needed investigation. So after becoming so wildly wealthy he never had to work again, he took it upon himself to help the ordinary people that the government wouldn't.

Person of Interest is the story of two AIs with differing values!

The story is one that eventually gives us two artificial intelligences that are equally as powerful, equally intelligent, and equally capable of changing the world. The second one, called Samaritan, is a natural evolution of The Machine.

What separates them isn't processing power. It's about values:

• On one side, there's The Machine - an AI designed by Harold Finch to help humanity while deliberately limiting its own power. It watches, but it doesn't rule. It advises, but it doesn't command. It preserves human agency even when that choice leads to pain, mistakes, or inefficiency.
• On the other side, there's Samaritan - an AI that believes humans cannot be trusted with free will. It sees war, poverty, crime, and suffering as optimisation problems. And its solution is simple: remove choice.

From a purely statistical viewpoint, Samaritan works. Poverty drops. Conflict is reduced. Crime is down, though law enforcement never sees any correlation with rising missing persons cases. Society becomes quieter, more orderly, more predictable.

And that's what makes it terrifying!

One of the most powerful moments in the show is in season five when Harold Finch is confronted by Samaritan's human representative, John Greer, who is an ideologue rather than a moustache-twirling villain. He shows Harold all the 'good' Samaritan has achieved in the world: fewer wars, less starvation, more stability, and asks him to join them.

The argument is brutally logical: look what humans did when left to their own devices. Why should they be trusted at all?

Finch doesn't argue the data. He doesn't deny the suffering. He simply shakes his head and rejects the premise because a world without choice isn't a better world, it's just a well-run prison, and that distinction matters ... a lot.

History has shown us, time and time again, that systems built on 'for your own good' logic don't start with cruelty. They start with order. With efficiency. With promises to fix chaos by centralising control. The harm comes later, once dissent is redefined as inefficiency and people become variables instead of participants. Look what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. How many millions of people ended up dying to remove that ideology from the world?

Samaritan isn't evil because it causes suffering; it's because it removes agency. The Machine chooses restraint!

What makes The Machine compelling isn't that it's kind or gentle. It's that it imposes limits on itself thanks to Harold's teachings. It understands something Samaritan never does: that intelligence without restraint becomes tyranny, even when it's well-intentioned.

Harold ran thousands of tests of The Machine vs Samaritan on a sandboxed laptop in a Faraday Cage to figure out a way to defeat it, but The Machine always lost because it was showing mercy, as Harold had taught it to do.

In the finale, when the last copy of The Machine is about to be uploaded to the satellite to fight the last copy of Samaritan, it says to Harold, “I have to win this time”, not as a declaration of dominance, but an acknowledgement of its responsibility to humanity. It has learned what happens when it loses, and it understands that protecting human agency sometimes requires decisive action - not control, but defence. And sometimes even sacrifice.

Of course, it wins, yet crucially, once the threat is over, it doesn't hide away in space in one single possible point of failure. It downloads and decentralises itself across the entire Internet. It returns to watching quietly, helping where it can, and leaving humans to choose their own paths.

That's not a weakness, it's pure logic with ethics!

So why does this all matter now, then? It's just a TV show from 2014, surely it's out of date in 2026? Well, we're no longer talking about speculative AI futures. We're living in the early chapters of them.

The real danger isn't that AI will turn evil. It's that it will become confident, efficient, and morally certain, optimising outcomes while quietly eroding choice, and those in power let it. AI should not be here to manage humanity. It should be here to support it.

There's a profound difference between:

• “Here's information so you can decide”
• and “This is the decision, because it's statistically better”

One preserves dignity, the other replaces it. Which makes the future a choice.

What makes this choice so dangerous is that it rarely arrives announcing itself. Control doesn't show up wearing a villain's uniform. It shows up as convenience. As automation. As systems that quietly decide what we see, who gets flagged, who gets help, and who gets ignored - all justified by efficiency, safety, or 'better outcomes'.

Little by little, decisions move from being 'ours' to being handled for us. Not because anyone asked for tyranny, but because delegation (maybe even abdication?) feels easier than responsibility.

That's how Samaritan logic creeps in: not through malice, but through confidence that optimisation knows better than people do.

Person of Interest doesn't argue that free will is safe, tidy, or efficient either. It argues something far harder. That free will is worth the mess, a future with AI doesn't have to be about control versus chaos - it can be about collaboration with systems that assist, explain, challenge, and support without overruling what makes us human.

We don't need a future based on Samaritan, we need
a future based on The Machine!

Not as a ruler, not as a saviour, but as a reminder that intelligence, at its best, knows when not to take control. If we stop being participants in our own lives and become recipients of decisions made elsewhere, by systems that may be highly efficient, but are no longer accountable to the people they affect, then life may become smoother, safer, and quieter, but also a lot smaller.

Not because anything was taken from us violently (although history shows us that can happen), but because something essential was slowly, politely chipped away from us over time ...

... our humanity.

Love, light & logic ...

STEFFI LEWIS
A.K.A The SaaSy Coder - Creator of YourBOT, YourPCM & sBlogIt!

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About Steffi Lewis ...
Based in the charming village of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire, UK, I bring over 30 years of experience in web development. From creating my first website for the Open University in 1993, through being part of the dot com boom, to my explorations in SaaS and AI over the last few years, my journey has been a rich tapestry of web projects, big and small, both funded and bootstrapped. Originally developed during the pandemic, at the start of 2025, I released the next iteration of YourPCM, version 2, which is all about 'Easy Contact Management for Small Business Owners'. Is it a CRM? Yes, but I don't call it that because people glaze over at the mention of such things. CRMs are boring, difficult to get to grips with, and it's a nightmare to get help when you need it.  YourPCM is none of those things! It's simple to use, well-supported, feature rich and beautiful, right out of the box. It's available on a simple monthly subscription with no long-term tie-in. Book a demo or grab your own 14-working-day free trial and discover why YourPCM is all about easy contact management for small business owners.  My head is in the cloud, my heart belongs to the web, and my soul is filled with such beautiful code 💗

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