Person of Interest began on CBS in the fall of 2011 with a relatively digestible premise: that in the post-9/11 era, we are all being watched by a computer surveillance system designed to root out terrorists. What Harold Finch, the designer of the system (called "the machine" on the show), hadn't accounted for was that it would also identify individuals (by their social security numbers) who were under the threat of more mundane crimes — or were soon to commit them themselves. The government didn't care about those people, but Finch, a brilliant, limping billionaire played by Michael Emerson, did. In the pilot episode, Finch enlisted John Reese, a broken, ex-CIA assassin — Jim Caviezel in full Clint Eastwood growl — to help him solve these pre-crimes. The show was created by Jonathan Nolan, who has co-written The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, along with the forthcoming Interstellar, with his brother, Christopher Nolan.

Along the way, Person of Interest — which airs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. and will end its third season next week — became something more. It became prescient, for one thing: The web the show had fictionally spun in which the government, often in collusion with corporations, is watching and listening to us, turned out to be almost exactly what Edward Snowden's leaks revealed to be true. While Person of Interest still has the spine of a case-of-the-week procedural, it has deepened into an acutely paranoid, multi-layered story about emotionally damaged, well-funded vigilantes (who kill frequently). The structure of the show also shifted in Season 3; Carter (Taraji P. Henson), Finch and Reese's police ally who also became a friend, was killed, and Shaw (Sarah Shahi) and Root (Amy Acker) — both of whom may be clinically insane — joined the gang. In Nielsen's season-to-date ratings, Person of Interest draws 14.2 million viewers. That's down marginally from last year when it aired on Thursday nights at 9 p.m., but it's still the fifth most-watched scripted show on network television.

Recently, I spoke with Nolan, who goes by Jonah, and executive producer Greg Plageman in their offices in Burbank. With a French poster for Francis Ford Coppola's paranoiac classic The Conversation looming over us, we discussed the show's disturbing reflection of current events, artificial intelligence, why we should probably trust the government more than we trust corporations, privacy, where the show is going, and how Person of Interest manages to be so popular. You may never want to post to Facebook or do a Google search again.

The show has really changed this season. Did it unfold the way you planned?

Jonathan Nolan: The first half of the season was building towards Carter's heroic demise. And then the second half of the season was building into what we call the international, or "the machine," storyline — bigger than organized crime in New York, more outward-looking. I don't know, Greg, did we do everything we planned to do?

Greg Plageman: I think so. We still have a few arrows in the quiver of things we want to explore next year. But I think the big thing is that, when Jonah and I started this show, in all the initial interviews we were doing, the constant, encroaching surveillance state was the theme. People were asking, "Is this science fiction?" And increasingly, it became obvious that it was a reality. And now that that's a quaint notion, and we've put that aside, I think the interesting theme we're going to be dealing with in the coming season is the emergence of AI.

JN: We're three seasons in now, and the premise is established as actual fact. But the difference between our show and PRISM is that PRISM fucking sucks. PRISM doesn't work. Because it's a fucking mountain of data. Right? It's an impossible problem. We're not software engineers, and that's not what we do, but we have an unlimited R&D budget in terms of ideas. We can just come up with whatever bullshit we want to in the room, and that's what we're putting in our show. With Finch trying to build a machine that can predict violent, aberrant human behavior, he finally realized that the only solution was to build something at least as smart as a human. And that's the moment we're in right now in history. Forget the show. We are currently engaged in an arms race — a very real one. But it's being conducted not by governments, as in our show, but by private corporations to build an AGI — to build artificial intelligence roughly as intelligent as a human that can be industrialized and used toward specific applications. Banal ones, boring ones: How do I lay out my factory floor to make the process of making widgets more efficient?

Are you techie people? AI and AGI are such vast concepts.

JN: Greg and I are big tech dorks. We spend a lot of time fascinated by this concept of artificial intelligence. We're back in soothsayer mode, emboldened by our correctly assessing our nation's surveillance state. But I'm pretty confident that we're going to see the emergence of AGI in the next 10 years. We have friends and sources within Silicon Valley — there is currently a headlong rush and race between a couple of very rich people to try to solve this problem. Maybe it will even happen in a way that no one knows about; that's the premise we take for our show. But we thought it would be a fun idea that the Manhattan Project of our era — which is preventing nuclear terrorism, that's the quiet thing that people have been diligently working on for 10 years — that's the subtext of the whole show. The problem of the modern era is: How do you find that needle in a haystack? How do you find that bomb that's going to level a city? A lot of the effort here has been toward that problem.