Person of Interest TV Series
The "Person of Interest" TV Series starring Jim Caviezel, Taraji P. Henson, Kevin Chapman, and Michael Emerson ran from 2011 to 2016, with 103 episodes total. My wife and I recently started watching it.
In the series (spoiler alert) Michael Emerson's character creates an AI powered surveillance system. It feeds information about terror attacks to Government officials, hopefully just in time for the attacks to be thwarted. Non-terrorist related violent crimes are supposed to be tabulated but then discarded as irrelevant. Emerson's character had modified the software to also send him notification about potential murder suspects and victims. He only receives a Social Security Number, and no additional information. He and his team have to figure out whether the number belongs to a perpetrator or a victim, and hopefully save lives.
Of course, the AI needs an incredible amount of access to real-time data to gather enough information to provide these notifications. Emerson's character builds a lot of safeguards into his system. Neither he nor anyone else can interact with the system he built. It wipes away anything it has learned throughout the day, every day, at midnight. It resets the operating system so it can't continually train itself.
Later on in the show, a competing, non-government, but very powerful agency spins up a competing AI. The competitor does not face the limitations that Emerson's machine does. It has greater access and is able to learn and retain what it learns.
The two AI's end up fighting each other so one may become dominant and exterminate the other. Both knowing and unwitting humans are caught in between and used with sometimes deadly consequences in the battle.
I find the acting a little cheesy sometimes, but the questions around the use of powerful AI including ethical concerns and what happens when AI becomes too powerful seem to align well with current happenings. It's pretty amazing to me that the writers were able to start addressing such issues before they were being discussed in media or academia yet.
It's worth a look, if only to help you explore AI issues and ethics from a unique perspective. Even though it's cheesy, I admit I like the actors and the back stories.
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