I often think about Person of Interest, and when I clicked on the post, I expected to be presented with something else entirely, as the show is now 15 years old. What a pleasant surprise!

I like to compare how similar or different The Machine is to current state-of-the-art LLMs. Interestingly, in this fiction, The Machine's preferred way of communicating doesn't seem to be through text, or even artificial speech. It can see almost everything, and seems capable of improving itself, but it feels "intelligent" in a way that humans or LLMs aren't. Maybe the writers thought that giving it the ability to write text or speak directly would make it "less" in many ways (less mysterious, less machine-like, less intelligent, etc.). It also gives the impression that you cannot really guess what it "thinks" or fully understand it.

I'm also realizing that most of the time, characters don't really have a "conversation" with The Machine, whereas it is a core feature of current-day LLMs. And The Machine doesn't even "create" its communication channels, it uses existing ones (phone booth, radio ...).

I especially like how Harold intentionally limited the output of the Machine. Just a social security number of either victim or perpetrator. That way there is always a human in the loop and you can't just arrest the perpetrator without human judgement.

In some flashbacks the author of the machine was using a chat interface in his terminal. I think he decided to let it to be entirely machine so that’s why it didn’t have a “voice”