An interview with hit show Person of Interest executive producers Jonah Nolan and Greg Plageman.

Steve Frosty Weintraub: Given that the machine does seem to have a plan will viewers find out what that plan is by the time season three is over?

Jonah Nolan: Yeah, you’re talking about a higher order intelligence. There’s some big questions. I don’t know. It depends on the plan. The plan has parts.

Definitively one aspect of what it’s doing we will answer. By the end of the season that will absolutely come into focus. The larger we were struck by some of the things in the Ray Kurzweil books Age of Intelligent Machine, Spiritual Machines, etc.

Kurzweil is an expert in the field and now a big honcho at Google, but with all due respect certain leaps that he is making are highly speculative. Some of the things that he talks about are really fascinating Moore’s law seems to predict that by the time you’d figured out that you’ve actually built something as smart as you, by definition it would probably already be twice as smart as you, which we thought was kind of a fascinating conundrum for people working in A.I. to have to deal with.

So the machine is really smart, probably way smarter than us, which is challenging, writing for an imaginary character that is way smarter than you. It keeps us on our toes. But we imagine that its plan will be multifaceted, complicated, and reactive to things that are kind of changing around it.

We wanted the show to be dangerous and unpredictable from the beginning. The machine is one of our characters so there’s no reason to imagine that just because it has a plan, that the plan is going to work out exactly just as it wants it to. […]