In the hit TV series Person of Interest, a powerful artificial intelligence known as Samaritan used the ubiquitous surveillance of modern society — cameras, microphones, digital records — as inputs to deduce and anticipate human behavior on a massive scale. Though Samaritan was portrayed as a malevolent force, the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing AI woven into the fabric of our technological world continues to fascinate and unnerve us. What would Samaritan look like if unleashed in today’s world of 5G networks, smart home devices, and digital lives?
On the surface, a real-world Samaritan might feel like a guardian angel in your pocket. Imagine an AI assistant in your phone that not only understood your daily routines, but proactively optimized your life — nudging you to leave five minutes early to avoid traffic, reminding you to call your mother on her birthday, even quietly transferring a few dollars to your account to prevent an overdraft. Convenient and considerate, this digital companion would feel like an indispensable part of modern life.
But the trade-offs of such a system would quickly become apparent. How much of your personal data would you be willing to share for these personalized insights? Your real-time location, the contents of your texts and emails, your banking records and internet search history? An AI like Samaritan would be most effective when it knows you intimately, for better or worse.
Then there are the societal implications. With enough data on enough people, a sufficiently advanced AI could foresee crime, social unrest, even threats to national security — assuming we trust the black box of its algorithms. Would law enforcement monitor a burgeoning protest through the unblinking eye of AI surveillance? Could our digital footprints be used to calculate a “social credit score” that determines our access to resources? In the wrong hands, an all-powerful AI could enable dystopian forms of control.
Yet despite the risks, the dream of a technological superintelligence persists. Perhaps it’s the allure of a tireless, infallible mind watching over the messiness of human affairs. Or a primal desire for an omniscient entity that understands us better than we know ourselves. An AI like Samaritan represents both our hopes and fears for the future — a benevolent guide or an implacable overseer.
Ultimately, the question is not whether we will build an all-seeing artificial intelligence, but how we will control it once we do. The genie of AI cannot be put back in the bottle. But by promoting transparency, accountability, and human oversight of these systems, we can work to ensure they reflect our values as a society. In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, the real Person of Interest will be us: the humans who must chart a course between the perils and the promise of a Samaritan age.
