What happens when nobody is watching?

Netflix recently launched all five seasons of Person of Interest in India. The decade-old American sci-fi crime series is built around a single premise. A reclusive programmer has built the world’s first genuinely intelligent machine, trained on every camera feed, every phone call, every electronic record in the United States.

It is omnipresent and omniscient. And it can also predict what will happen before it does.

But the creator has done something deliberate. He has separated what the machine knows from what it can do. He programmes it to delete its own memory every night at midnight. It would cripple the machine, but, in the creator’s mind, this was the right thing to do.