Person of Interest

"The government has a secret system - a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect act of terror but it sees everything - violent crimes involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the government considered...irrelevant. They wouldn't act so I decided I would. But I needed a partner...someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us. But victim or perpetrator, if your number's up, we'll find you." 

So begins each episode of Person of Interest, now midway through its first season and the only new show of the 2011 season I'm bothering to follow. Created by Jonathan Nolan - brother to Chris Nolan of The Dark Knight and Inception fame - Person of Interest is a kind of police procedural with a post-911 twist: secretive billionaire Mr. Finch (the delightfully creepy Michael Emerson) uses the machine he built for the government to prevent crimes before they happen. Each episode the machine spits out a social insurance number, which Finch and his enforcer, John Reese (the often wooden but serviceable Jim Caviezel) use to identify the victim - or perhaps the perpetrator. They don't know which the "person of interest" is until they investigate.

I started watching partly because of Nolan's pedigree and because the series is produced by Bad Robot, JJ Abrams' production company. At first I wasn't especially impressed. The show begins with pretty standard 21st century tropes: you have your emotionally wounded ex-mercenary with a dark past trying to atone for his sins, your socially awkward but brilliant tech guy, lots of shenanigans with hacking into computer systems and cell phones, gunplay, martial arts and all the other hoo-ha common to action/adventure shows.

But as a student of serialized drama, I've kept watching because sometimes visionary creators start off using standard formulas to secure a core mainstream audience, then increase the show's complexity once they have that base of viewers. My patience is slowly being rewarded as we learn more about the characters and the world they inhabit. Through flashbacks, we learn that Mr. Finch had a business partner, an idealist whose doom is heavily foreshadowed (and in fact made explicit in the most recent episode). Reese's character is given additional nuance, his plight made more sympathetic and believable as we discover how he was manipulated by his political masters. In a couple of episodes, our heroes guess wrong when it comes to determining the nature of the person of interest - victim or perpetrator. And they even fail a couple of times, the bad guy getting away. 

Most exciting to me, however, are the subtle hints - usually embedded in computer graphics that flash by almost subliminally - that the machine itself acts to protect itself and may be developing sentience. Person of Interest is, currently, only marginally a science fiction show, extrapolating only in one sense, imagining even more public surveillance than we currently endure today. It is not yet a show about renegade artificial intelligences, and it may never be. But as a fan of SF and AI stories in particular, the creators have certainly hooked me for the duration.

The show is also starting to raise questions about the legitimacy of ubiquitous surveillance. In one flashback, Finch and his business partner have a discussion about the implications of the machine they're about to hand over to the government, and whether or not it's wise. In the end they hand over the machine, but not without turning it into a self-contained, uncrackable system with strictly limited powers of observation, answerable only to itself; even the men who created it can no longer manipulate it. All this is done rather matter-of-factly, but the story possibilities of such an act are tremendously tantalizing. And of course Finch and Reese invade privacy and break the law every week, their actions questioned only by the police detective who, in the early episodes at least, is trying to chase them down. She's recently been subverted to the cause, which may damage the ethical integrity of the show (such as it is); I hope that the creators will introduce another antagonist to replace her, because the leads really need to be reminded in real terms that the ends to not justify the means. This is a show about vigilantes, and I hope that at some point they'll get a karmic smackdown for their methods.

Larger debates aside, Person of Interest is becoming a good show. Not a great show - 85 percent of the writing remains formulaic - but a show of...interest. Emerson is fantastic, the production values are top notch, the premise solid, the potential for powerful themes just waiting to be fully tapped. I hope Nolan and his team grow bolder, because they could have a real gem on their hands.

Billions and Billions of Kudos for Dr. Carl Sagan

Yesterday would have been Carl Sagan's 77th birthday. My first exposure to Sagan came, as it did for so many others, through his PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The show mesmerized me from its opening seconds, with its majestic opening music and journey through the stars to Sagan himself, defining the universe thusly: "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be..."

In thirteen hour-long episodes, Sagan explained our current scientific understanding of the cosmos, covering astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology and how all these elements impact human history and culture. I devoured both the series and Sagan's companion book, Cosmos, ravenously. Sagan wrote and educated with sublime beauty and passion, inviting viewers and readers to explore the wonders of the cosmos in a manner that was inviting, warm, logical, scientific, even reverent, but never condescending or opaque. I bought the Cosmos DVD set back when it was an expensive limited-edition set available only online, and I have no regrets about paying a premium for the show. Important works deserve our support.

After Cosmos I scooped up The Dragons of Eden and Broca's Brain and eagerly awaited each of Sagan's books in the years to come. My favourite, alongside Cosmos, remains The Demon-Haunted World, one of the best books ever written on the importance of critical thought.

Back in the 90s I wrote book reviews for Singapore's The Peak magazine. Here's an excerpt from one of those reviews, covering Sagan's last book, Billions and Billions. The review's final line remains a pretty good summary of my feelings for Dr. Sagan and his work.

...Finally, on a somewhat somber note, we come to the late Dr. Carl Sagan's final work, Billions and Billions.  The book's subtitle is sadly prophetic - "Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium".  Dr. Sagan, whose contributions to the space program and to science education in general are almost incalculable, died last year of a rare blood disease. Billions and Billions is a worthy capstone to a brilliant career.

As in his previous books, Sagan attempts to lift the dark clouds of superstition and ignorance that continue to hinder humanity's progress towards achieving greatness as a species. Sagan takes a level-headed, rational view towards contentious subjects like abortion, the environment, and nuclear arms proliferation in this book without preaching or seeming arrogant. Especially interesting is the chapter detailing his efforts to unite scientists and religious leaders under one popular front devoted to expressing concern over the damage that we are doing to our precious environment.  That such diverse and often conflicting groups can be united to advance a common cause is reason for hope in what often seems a hopeless world.  The entire book is laced with cautious optimism, even in its closing pages, as Sagan describes his battle with the blood disorder that eventually killed him. For this, the gift of hope, rather than mourning his passing, we should celebrate the fact that such individuals exist all around us, fighting the tyranny of despair and giving us reasons to hope, to dream, to live.  This was Sagan's legacy.  

85 Billion Stories

Barring a global catastrophe, the world's human population will soon hit seven billion. According to this BBC application, when I was born the population was about half what it is now. That's a staggering amount of growth for my short 42-year lifespan, but what really puts the scale of human existence in perspective for me is the news that I'm merely the 78 billionth (rounding up) person to have lived since history began*.

For fun, I tried pretending that I'd been born in the year zero just to see what numbers that would produce, but unfortunately the earliest birth year you can choose is 1910, which would make you about the 1.7 billionth person alive on Earth at the time and the 72nd billionth to have ever lived. Children being born in the next few days will live at the tail end of over 83 billion souls.

Now think of how many people are remembered these days, out of 83 billion - all the generals, poets, painters, scientists, politicians, inventors, murderers, saints, athletes, singers, writers, philosophers, kings and queens. How many historical figures are remembered today, collectively? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Even if we remember a million of our ancestors, that represents a tiny, tiny fraction of everyone who's ever existed. Not long from now, there will have been 85 billion of us. 85 billion human stories! Imagine if we could somehow reach back in time and rediscover just a few of the billions of stories that have been lost in the mists of deep time. How much wisdom have we lost? How much art? How many scientific breakthroughs?

Some might pessimistically argue that the vast majority of these 85 billion stories were (or will be, for those extant today) short, brutal and unremarkable. But even if that were true (and I would argue that every person's story has inherent interest), even if 84 out of 85 billion stories weren't worth knowing - that still leaves nearly a billion new tales to add to the human canon! How I would love to read an eyewitness account of the construction of the Colossus, for example, or the story of a common labourer in ancient Mesopotamia, or an account of the humans who crossed the Bering land bridge from Asia to North America.

Unless we invent some kind of time travel technology, most of those stories will remain lost. How bottomless is the pool of our collective ignorance!

*The BBC explains its methodology thusly:
Both numbers have been calculated using UN Population Division figures. The first is an estimate of how many people were alive on your date of birth. It is one possible value based on global population figures and estimates of growth rates over time. Data before 1950 is less accurate than figures after that date. The second number includes calculations based on the methodology of scholar Carl Haub, who estimated how many people had been alive since 50,000 B.C. His calculation has been amended by the UN to include additional points in time.