Here’s Person Of Interest‘s villainous Samaritan A.I. explained. Person Of Interest is a thriller series created by Jonathan Nolan. Before the show, Nolan frequently collaborated with his filmmaker brother Christopher Nolan on screenplays. He penned the short story that inspired Memento, and the duo worked together on Interstellar and the final two entries in the Dark Knight series. He’s currently best known for his reboot of Westworld on HBO, which was based on Michael Crichton’s cult sci-fi film.
Like Westworld, Person Of Interest deals with themes of robots and A.I.’s gaining sentience and free will, and revolves around a machine that can predict crimes. The Machine’s creator Finch – played by Michael Emerson – recruits an ex-CIA agent named Reese (Jim Caviezel) to investigate its various predictions. Finch and Reese soon build up a little team around The Machine, and the show evolved from a procedural to something more unique as it progressed, before coming to an end with the fifth season in 2016.
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Person Of Interest revealed that The Machine was created in response to 9/11 and the need for an A.I. capable of sifting through vast quantities of data to seek out potential threats. What made The Machine unique is that it’s creator Finch gave it empathy, so it doesn’t just act on cold hard data and can understand things from a human perspective. Of course, The Machine wasn’t the only A.I. created with these parameters, with Person Of Interest season 3 revealing the existence of a rival program dubbed Samaritan.
Person Of Interest’s Samaritan was created by Arthur Claypool but while the government shut the project down, its drives were later recovered by Decima Technologies. Their goal for Samaritan is for the A.I. to take control of the world and run it without pesky parameters like humanity or empathy, and only acting on data alone. Once the A.I. is up and running its starts recruiting agents to its cause and identifying and eliminating threats to itself and its goals. Its capabilities are beyond that of The Machine too, being to target and analyze individuals down to the most minute details.
While they may have been developed with similar objectives in mind, the methods of The Machine and the Samaritan A.I.’s are in complete opposition. The finale of Person Of Interest sees Reese, Finch and The Machine race against time to destroy The Samaritan once and for all after it tries to escape to a satellite, but after some sacrifices are made, they succeed in destroying the rogue A.I. for good.
