Jonathan Nolan’s Person of Interest predicted AI. Westworld is helping build it.

Nolan started thinking about the subject, he said, in 2006 when he began writing Interstellar. The treacherous onboard computer had become, since Kubrick’s 1968 2001, a cliché.

“You’re waiting for it to go bad and blow the crew out of the hatch and seize the mission and take over — the plot of 2001, which is one of my all-time favorite movies — but that’s not what happens,” Nolan said. “They’re just the best of us, loyal, brave, consistent, smart. So you try to create a different emotional relationship.”

But working with Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg on a $165 million space movie is slow, painstaking work. While that film slogged through development, Jonathan Nolan pitched the producer J.J. Abrams on an idea that he’d developed while writing The Dark Knight, where Batman uses a vast, cellphone-based surveillance system to hunt The Joker. “This is too much power,” says Morgan Freeman’s character before destroying it.

Nolan had understood at the time that you’d need neural networks to process that vast flood of data. It was one of a few things he hadn’t had space to address in the three Batman movies. Another was that Batman is always fighting an escalating series of super-villains, rarely solving the sort of mundane crimes that fill serialized comic books.

“The odd and unusual thing in Batman is, of course, Batman,” he said. He reconfigured it for CBS into a procedural formula whose “A-story” solves a different, self-contained crime while its “B-story” sometimes advances a larger plot, in a different New York neighborhood each week.

The Bruce Wayne character was fractured into a reclusive billionaire and a damaged vigilante. The rich technologist built the AI for the US government to defeat terror threats — but now operates his own program saving regular people whose deaths would be “irrelevant” to government policy. And in typical procedural fashion, Nolan built a little family around his main characters, including a corrupt New York cop and a woman whose religious belief in AI turns her into a kind of cyborg.

Nolan, who was relying on the Nobelist Kip Thorne for scientific details in Interstellar, also went to the source for AI. He found AI luminaries like Elon Musk and DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, and credits them — and a strong writer’s room — for the prescient technical details.

As the show developed, he also continued to tease out the morally ambiguous theme of how AIs should be treated. The Machine, initially sinister, becomes vulnerable, sympathetic, and even heroic. In the final episode, the protagonist, played by Jim Caviezel, gives his life to save it.

Person of Interest hit big: It was the fifth most watched show in America in the 2012-2013 season, sandwiched between NCIS: Los Angeles and American Idol. But it never got much critical recognition, and never tapped a zeitgeist whose focus was elsewhere. (There was a blip of interest in surveillance at the time of the Edward Snowden revelations.) One critic who took Person of Interest seriously, BuzzFeed’s Kate Aurthur, called it “the most subversive show on television.”

Nolan told Aurthur in a 2014 interview that he was “pretty confident that we’re going to see the emergence of AGI in the next 10 years,” which sounded bizarre at the time to laymen who even understood that he was referring to “artificial general intelligence,” and now seems about right.

Westworld, which debuted in 2016, was the next logical step. It began with a conversation with Abrams, who suggested a show with “a little more of the point of view of the robots.” Nolan and his wife chose to base it on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film, Westworld, set it in a theme park where people go to live out dark Western fantasies of murder and rape. But it’s accepted because the victims — called “hosts” — are merely ultra-realistic robots — until the line of who is human starts to blur.

Technologists of our era love sci-fi. They may not have been watching CBS weeknights in 2012, but they were binging Westworld half a decade later. Nolan held the premiere in San Francisco, which was attended by a who’s who of Silicon Valley, including OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman.

The show still serves as inspiration for some AI researchers, Nolan said. Some AI labs have based some new techniques on the one that led to consciousness among the hosts.

In the show, the hosts are updated with “reveries,” or subtle character traits, such as a favorite song or a tick, but they are actually tied to memories that are supposed to have been erased. The reveries end up being the hook that allows the robots to access past memories, and that puts them on the path to consciousness.

Memory has become a key topic among frontier research companies of late. “I’ve had direct conversations with some of the people in this space who are basing some of their ideas on the reveries,” Nolan said. “I’m not sure whether to react with alarm or feel flattered.”

Before we let Nolan go, we had to ask him the obvious question: Does he use AI to write or give notes on screenplays?

He shuddered, and talked about everything from the Hollywood writer’s strike to the notion that any form of art requires human intention.

“Oh God, no,” he replied. “That’s crossing the Rubicon.”