"Person of Interest" Season 4 will be the season of artificial intelligence, and showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman could not be more excited. The pair essentially blew up the premise of their show during its Season 3 finale, and when audiences return in Season 4 they'll find main heroes Finch, Reese, Shaw and Root in a completely new world. But that world might not be so different from our own after all. Zap2it spoke with Nolan and Plageman about the season finale, what's in store for Season 4, the real-life situations they're basing their AI predictions on and whether or not Root and Shaw will actually consummate the fan-favorite 'ship. Zap2it: How far back did you have this plan to let the bad guys win at the end of Season 3?

Jonathan Nolan: Greg, when did we come up with this?

Greg Plageman: Man, this one goes back a ways. We initially conceived the idea of an alternate machine. Decima was an interesting international organization, sort of without boundaries. We kind of have always known that there would be a proliferation of AIs; there would be this competing entity as early as this season, we talked about it. The only question for us was, "When would this thing finally take over?" We talked about next season, and we get to that point where we just can't help ourselves and we pull story up. We say, let's go for it, let's blow it up and let's figure it out from there. In this case, it felt like the right move. It felt like it dovetailed really nicely, too, when the idea came up that Samaritan effectively created Vigilance as a construct. That felt too juicy to pass up. It kind of all coalesced very nicely in a monster twist where Mr. Greer drank Mr. Collier's milkshake. It was a blast.

I think the bigger twist was that it seems like you guys are throwing the procedural conceit out the door at the end of this season and our heroes have now lost their identities. Have you figured out yet how you want the show to move forward in Season 4?

JN: Yeah, absolutely. We like being reckless, but always with a plan. That was our pact with the audience, was that we would be reckless with them a little bit in terms of the risks that we take with the characters and the storylines, but that this was always going somewhere. This show has always been headed towards this season's finale, and headed out of it, we know exactly where we're going. There will be some fun surprises along the way. But one of the things that we were most excited about three seasons in is we had these superhero-like figures, but for Reese and Shaw and Root and Finch, their lives have been somewhat simple until this point because they just get to do the cool part. They just get to be the heroes.

They haven't, until this point, been saddled with being real people. In superhero terms, they haven't had to have their secret identity. Finch has dabbled in it over the years, they've all had fun playing at being one person or another, but they've never been locked into those identities. As Root put it in her closing voiceover last night, in a world in which everyone is watched, stamped, indexed, numbered, the only outliers are the people who don't fit that mold. So our characters now, in addition to figuring out how to save the world and save someone's world in New York every week, will have to figure out how to masquerade as real people. That, I think, proved irresistible to us as a writing challenge -- and hopefully as an acting challenge for our amazing cast in terms of adding that new dimension to their roles.

This is a really big change for the series.

JN: In terms of the bigger story of our show, it's game on. We've always flirted, we've always been headed in this direction of our show being about artificial intelligence and about the weirdness of the world that's coming to us. We were a couple years out in front of the Prism story. We think we're about five years out from the artificial intelligence story. We think there is a real possibility that when AI emerges, it will not do so publicly. That a company will build it in secret, and then potentially deploy it in secret to unknown effect and impact, probably within an industrial application first. Consider this: The company that is pouring the most resources into building AI right now is Google. There's no secret about it. It's very public.

We love predicting the future, and obviously -- hopefully -- the future is a little less dystopian than what we've presented at the end of last night's episode. But we absolutely think this is where the world is going, with a multitude of AI essentially doing battle with each other in exactly the same way that corporations do battle with each other these days on the stock market and in corporate espionage and those terms. So we're super excited at the larger storyline we're trying to tell -- and the smaller storyline. How these characters are going to deal with taking out the trash and dating [ laughs] and having a day job.

I have to applaud you guys, because this show is so meticulously researched, and it's really nice to have that on TV.

See more here:

'Person of Interest' EPs tease Season 4 AI battles and the Root and Shaw 'ship