Notes for season 4 episode 15, “Q&A“
01:10 Fetch and Retrieve is the in-universe version of Google (first seen being used in season 1). We see the CTO and CEO in the office. You’d assume it was a Silicon Valley company – but it appears to be headquartered in New York.
03:00 The CEO shows off a voice based search product, VAL. This episode aired in early 2015, Google Voice Search was released in 2012. (Virtual assistant Siri launched in in 2011, Alexa in 2014.) The 2010s represented a shift from statistical natural language processing (NLP), to neural network-based processing. We can see that it works by sending a sound recording to remote servers, where NLP processing is performed. This is still mostly how it works in 2023 with low cost devices, however one of the selling points of Apple products (for privacy) for the last few years has been that they can now process most speech on-device without needing to upload it.
(VAL is presumably a play on HAL 9000, the AI from the movie 2001. This would be the sort of codename an engineering team would use, before being changed by the marketing team after checking it against a list of famous killer AIs: SkyNet, Proteus IV, etc.)
04:12 Anna is played by Bella Dayne, who would appear in AI-related show “Humans” in 2016.
05:55 Finch has an “Shadow Map” overlay on his vector map of New York. Unsurveilled areas are bounded by red lines.
06:11 Finch finds hidden data embedded on the poster when he zooms to 100x. I’m assuming this this a poster he downloaded from somewhere, rather than a scan of one he pulled from a lamppost?
07:30 Classic Person of Interest switch. Have Reece assume, from bruising, a woman was being physically abused… but then it turns out she competes in underground MMA fights. I guess it’s fortunate he discovered this before beating the shit out of someone innocent?
09:54 “Professional mixed-martial arts are illegal in New York.” They were still illegal at the point this episode was made, but a bill (A02604) to allow professional MMA was already in the works, and passed just over a year later in March 2016.
10:20 We get a shot of Finch using the same keyboard that’s been seen in previous episodes. I’ve tried and failed to identify this keyboard – it’s a slim external full keyboard with flat white keys, and a mirrored/reflective strip at the top. My first guess might have been a Cherry Strait, but it’s not.
14:56 The name of the search user being discussed is “Paul Zimmerman”, which sounds very similar to PGP-creator Phil Zimmermann. Reece checks the logs and we see timestamped queries that go from “What are the signs of depression?” to “I need the number of a suicide hotline” in under 20 minutes. There’s a 2022 movie Kimi, with a similar “voice search analyst is exposed to disturbing entries” plot line.
21:00 Finch uses a different search engine “Hook Line and Seeker”. Presumably to avoid suggesting the A and B plots aren’t linked.
23:03 The Trojan Horse flash drive prop is a SanDisk Cruzer Glide.
29:30 I assume Fusco turned up without a warrant? IMO a search engine employee giving user search queries (even a dead one) to police without a warrant risks more PR damage in the long run than any unfortunate AI search responses.
29:33 We get to see the backend code, and it looks like LISP. Not even Clojure. Head office is full of twenty-somethings, but the code is presumably being written by greybeards close to retirement?
32:00 The big conspiracy is revealed to be that the search engine is personalising responses, based on user data, to make users more susceptible to targeted advertising… provided by the same company. A nightmare sci-fi dystopia.
32:22 “The new algorithm was placed in the system anonymously” That’s a billion dollar web business with no release control?
35:35 Anna combat rolls in and kicks ass. Clearly another potential Shaw-replacement.
36:40 The show seeds the suggestion that the AI Bentham initially takes over by establishing charter schools.
43:00 We are left with the chilling proposition of a leading online search company controlled by acolytes of an AI-directed future. A nightmare sci-fi dystopia, etc.