The Machine is a computer surveillance system appears in a television show called Person of Interest. It is an American television crime drama broadcasted on CBS and developed by Jonathan Nolan. The plot follows former CIA agent John Reese (Jim Caviezel), who is presumed dead and teams up with reclusive billionaire Harold Finch (Michael Emerson) to prevent violent crimes in New York City by using the Machine.

After 9/11, The Machine was created to analyse security feeds from domestic organizations and foreign entities in order to predict terrorist attacks and create intelligence reports that allow the US government to prevent terrorist activity. The Machine uses data combined from other sources such as video footage, phone calls (landline, VOIP, mobile), GPS, electronic transactions, e-mails and social media.

Recently, Nolan admitted he was gloating a little with the news about PRISM and the NSA whistleblower Snowden. The function of PRISM acts in the same way The Machine was designed, it monitors everyone and determines whether any criminal activities are happening. Nolan described that in the television show, the Machine actually works whereas in our reality PRISM wouldn’t functional yet. Nolan hopes that the NSA “has turned on a spigot so big that it couldn’t possibly retrieve anything useful out of the data.”

This is a prime example of design fiction, the idea of a massive computer surveillance system is realistically possible to the level of our technology. Surveillance and spy technology have improved drastically in the 21st century and that the logical next step would be to create an efficient, automatous surveillance system. Ironically, the idea of the television show came become the actual news of PRISM and whistleblower Snowden. It is tangible proof that design fiction works and predicts accurately on potential inventions.