A genre splicing, inventive gem hiding in the procedural rough of CBS programming, Person of Interest deftly delivers an epic at once underworld crime drama, paranoid surveillance state critique, Punisher-esque vigilante heroics, and sci-fi speculation on the potential and pitfalls of sentient artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, this mashup may be too eclectic and ambitious for some, as this year saw diminishing ratings and CBS granting the renewal of ambivalence, to resume and conclude halfway into the next fall season. Some fans that had attached to some of its aspects more than others expressed concern at its more serial-centric evolution, their recognition scrambled by its ambition like an infra red mask. The show’s storytelling was at an all time height of complexity and intrigue in its fourth season finale that will be heartbreaking to see forcibly truncated or untold.

Yes, Person of Interest is the show that predicted Snowden, but like the dilemmas the whistle blower illuminated, this is largely considered within the limited dimensions of government surveillance. POI’s prescience and poignancy deserves wider consideration of its reflections of reality in speculation: “the government has a system,” Harold always tells us, but it’s watching a system itself, of behavior.

The Machine, the AI panopticon of Harold’s design, analyzes our behavior through its many eyes and ears, predicting in simulation what we will do to each other. Her original intent was to facilitate intervention in the matrix of our interaction, for the vigilante protagonists to correct parts of the dynamic equation. Person of Interest displays different approaches to that process, each character making a decision that causes systems of interaction to collide and conflict. We have a ripple effect on each other, cascading dichotomies of relevant/irrelevant, criminal/law enforcement, government/corporate, human/artificial.

Our surveillance capabilities, system of governance, legal system, and intelligence, technological and otherwise, are all systems of behavior and interaction. They are extensions of ourselves that, like metadata, indicate who we are and what we want society to be. In other words, our policies and structures are architectures coded with and by our values. Current events have seen conflicts of systemic inequities exposed: income inequality, racial disparity, police brutality. While the more apparent effects of these problems are part of public discourse, fundamental reconsiderations of the systems underneath are often taboo or dismissed as unrealistic. If a cohesive intelligence emerged from our social arrangements and institutions, our economies and governments, what would it reflect about us? Corporate mystery man John Greer sees irreconcilable patterns and innately human flaws, and as such defers authority and decision making to his AI overlord, whose own inhumanity ironically makes a ‘concerned third party,’ a euphemistic phrase of anonymous, objective intervention repeated by our vigilante heroes when questioned about their mission. His take on AI intervention in human affairs, subversively dubbed Samaritan, is a more aggressive take than Harold’s Machine. Rather than simply offering its gaze, or restraining the possibility of its exploitation by coding and anonymizing us all as a number, Samaritan actively seeks the rearrangement and manipulation of the human pieces as part of a grand plan it and its agents call The Correction. It takes control of the U.S. stock exchange, acquires a huge portfolio of tech companies with hardware and algorithms to augment itself, restructures a small Upstate New York town for maximal efficiency of infrastructure, employment, and education, prepares brain computer interface implants for direct control and monitoring of human subjects, and eliminates crime (entirely!) from New York City for a full twenty four hours. This is all before it orchestrates a large scale and stealthy elimination of anyone deemed ‘deviant’ and a threat to its existence and aims. Samaritan is the full realization of solving the human equation by removing the human element from that solution, aiming for nothing short of total, absolute security. It represents our desire to devise systems of protection and authority that we can depend on more than ourselves, to transcend our own biases, discriminations, and systemic inequities, and in reality this is manifesting in ways that may surprise or terrify you. Where before our imperfection was watched over by a Machine of loving grace, the new system intends to reshape or restart to accomplish perfection. Team Machine, then, become the last vestige of hope for a cooperative, self-reflexive approach that combines human-made systems with human action. They are the pre-9/11 paradigm of protection that appears to have disappeared from our real world completely: restraint over brute force, reaction over pre-emptive strike. Given that the original catalyst for Mr. Finch’s creation was itself a reaction to that very event, this arrival is cyclical and poignant for the group.

Narrow artificial intelligence systems have come to fruition and spread into so many aspects of our real, daily lives, something the show has heralded since its inception and grown more direct about with each season (see season four’s Google Now-esque human-assisted search engine Fetch & Retrieve in ‘Q&A’ for example). While artificial intelligence worthy of Root’s obsessive devotion, that would be described by skeptics with qualifiers like ‘hard’, ‘true’, or ‘general’, has yet to exist, acknowledgement of The Machine and Samaritan as sentient or facsimile is, to coin a phrase popular with these characters, irrelevant. These systems, our systems, are meaningful enough as reflections of our sentience. Big Data is the Quantified Us, radical instrumentation in the social scientific analysis of human behavior. What this information in aggregate reveals about us has been the philosophical crux of so much science fiction in the 21st century depicting synthetic beings: even if its a facsimile of a sentient being, is it still morally justifiable to even pantomime slavery or fascism or any form of exploitation? If a Synth isn’t a person, but a walking and talking metaphor for us, does it not still reflect poorly upon humanity when we treat them arbitrarily?

We’ll see how Harold and Root reconcile their approaches when rebuilding the Machine, and what a world of Samaritan’s control fully realized looks like, in season 5, recently stated by executive producer J.J. Abrams to likely be the show’s final year. In the meantime, watch the remorseful Machine on the verge of death, and ask yourself, ‘If Facebook or Twitter could talk, what would they say to us?’