Harold Finch (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ornithologist) wrote2024-10-12 02:27 pm
ornithologist) wrote2024-10-12 02:27 pm
.//application
⏵ player information
name and pronouns: Liv (she/her)
age: 35
contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
chirality, whiskeyqueer @ discord
⏵ character information
name: Harold Finch
canon: Person of Interest
age: 56
canon point: 3x06 "Mors Praematura"
history: Fandom wiki page.
abilities: Harold's foremost ability is that he is the creator of the first true artificial intelligence, or as he later comes to call it, artificial super intelligence (ASI). He is a master programmer and hacker, and a fair hand at electrical engineering in a pinch. It's not to comic book levels, though -- he has some pretty reasonable limits and it takes him many years to make the Machine, his ASI. If it can be coded or hacked, though, he can do it with the right resources. Also: he made his universe's version of Facebook intentionally to get personal information on people. Mildly terrifying!
Other than that, he is very good at knowing when he's being stalked and losing a tail, and he has impeccable taste in menswear, art, and classic literature.
personality: Harold Finch is a very private person, by nature and by necessity. In fact, his real name isn't even Finch -- we know his first name is Harold, but as a viewer, we never find out his real surname, and his closest friends don't, either. Harold plays things close to the vest, both as a key personality trait and because association with Harold tends to get people killed. He has immense survivor's guilt from this fact, and he sometimes quips about how justified his paranoia is -- only the paranoid survive, and so forth.
Proximity with Harold places people in danger because he is responsible for creating the world's first-ever artificial super intelligence (ASI), the Machine, and the U.S. government has a vested interest in keeping it secret -- and others have an interest in using him as leverage to gain access to it. He developed it working for years after 9/11 to create something that had access to all of the government's information feeds (all of them) which would then issue warnings to help detect and prevent acts of terror.
At his core, Harold is a thoroughly altruistic person -- however stiff and reserved he is on the outside, peel back a few ruffled layers and you'll find someone incredibly generous, compassionate, and kind. He hates seeing people in pain and he wants more than anything to help others, while staying behind the scenes and receiving as little credit as possible. It's this innate tendency to be giving that spurs Harold to develop the Machine, to try to prevent more death, and ultimately sells it to the U.S. government for $1.
However naïve he was in creating the Machine, Harold was already deeply cynical about human nature. He believed that he had to put strict limits on the Machine to prevent abuse. This mindset is at the core of Harold's personality: he has strong convictions that he will not easily compromise. He values each individual human life and refuses to measure value for one over another. He cuts off his own access to the Machine to ensure he can't be used against it. He turns it into a black box, a closed system, so the only thing it feeds the government are identifying numbers of people about to commit certain, imminent violence.
This push and pull between his iron-clad ethics (his own rules, as he once calls them) and his own emotions regularly comes into conflict. And it means that no matter how hard he tries to keep other people at a distance, once someone worms their way in, he is absolutely loyal and over-the-top affectionate in actions if not in words. Harold will go to absurd lengths to support and care for his loved ones.
Through his relationship with John and later with his other teammates, we finally start to see Harold's protective shield of privacy get let down. He and John achieve a point of unconditional trust and mutual support, often following each other's lead even when they explicitly disagree, and Harold's other major relationships (particularly Root) all challenge him in some way, too.
One of his resolute morals is ensuring there is a human element in all major decisions, that nothing is driven solely by a computer, because he has inherent respect for the human experience. In the end, the best summary of Harold is that he's a computer genius who, without a trace of irony, is intensely skeptical of computers and cares desperately about people.
samples: TDM top level!
name and pronouns: Liv (she/her)
age: 35
contact:
⏵ character information
name: Harold Finch
canon: Person of Interest
age: 56
canon point: 3x06 "Mors Praematura"
history: Fandom wiki page.
abilities: Harold's foremost ability is that he is the creator of the first true artificial intelligence, or as he later comes to call it, artificial super intelligence (ASI). He is a master programmer and hacker, and a fair hand at electrical engineering in a pinch. It's not to comic book levels, though -- he has some pretty reasonable limits and it takes him many years to make the Machine, his ASI. If it can be coded or hacked, though, he can do it with the right resources. Also: he made his universe's version of Facebook intentionally to get personal information on people. Mildly terrifying!
Other than that, he is very good at knowing when he's being stalked and losing a tail, and he has impeccable taste in menswear, art, and classic literature.
personality: Harold Finch is a very private person, by nature and by necessity. In fact, his real name isn't even Finch -- we know his first name is Harold, but as a viewer, we never find out his real surname, and his closest friends don't, either. Harold plays things close to the vest, both as a key personality trait and because association with Harold tends to get people killed. He has immense survivor's guilt from this fact, and he sometimes quips about how justified his paranoia is -- only the paranoid survive, and so forth.
Proximity with Harold places people in danger because he is responsible for creating the world's first-ever artificial super intelligence (ASI), the Machine, and the U.S. government has a vested interest in keeping it secret -- and others have an interest in using him as leverage to gain access to it. He developed it working for years after 9/11 to create something that had access to all of the government's information feeds (all of them) which would then issue warnings to help detect and prevent acts of terror.
At his core, Harold is a thoroughly altruistic person -- however stiff and reserved he is on the outside, peel back a few ruffled layers and you'll find someone incredibly generous, compassionate, and kind. He hates seeing people in pain and he wants more than anything to help others, while staying behind the scenes and receiving as little credit as possible. It's this innate tendency to be giving that spurs Harold to develop the Machine, to try to prevent more death, and ultimately sells it to the U.S. government for $1.
However naïve he was in creating the Machine, Harold was already deeply cynical about human nature. He believed that he had to put strict limits on the Machine to prevent abuse. This mindset is at the core of Harold's personality: he has strong convictions that he will not easily compromise. He values each individual human life and refuses to measure value for one over another. He cuts off his own access to the Machine to ensure he can't be used against it. He turns it into a black box, a closed system, so the only thing it feeds the government are identifying numbers of people about to commit certain, imminent violence.
This push and pull between his iron-clad ethics (his own rules, as he once calls them) and his own emotions regularly comes into conflict. And it means that no matter how hard he tries to keep other people at a distance, once someone worms their way in, he is absolutely loyal and over-the-top affectionate in actions if not in words. Harold will go to absurd lengths to support and care for his loved ones.
Through his relationship with John and later with his other teammates, we finally start to see Harold's protective shield of privacy get let down. He and John achieve a point of unconditional trust and mutual support, often following each other's lead even when they explicitly disagree, and Harold's other major relationships (particularly Root) all challenge him in some way, too.
One of his resolute morals is ensuring there is a human element in all major decisions, that nothing is driven solely by a computer, because he has inherent respect for the human experience. In the end, the best summary of Harold is that he's a computer genius who, without a trace of irony, is intensely skeptical of computers and cares desperately about people.
samples: TDM top level!
Personal Background (Short Version)
After 9/11 and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Nathan and Harold decided it wasn't enough to get rich and rest on their laurels. They wanted to do something to protect the country. For that reason, Harold abandoned all commercial enterprise and spent the next seven years developing the Machine, an artificial super intelligence dedicated to detecting acts of terrorism and informing the U.S. government in time to act and prevent loss of life. IFT sold it to the government for $1.
Harold's secretive nature ends up saving his life. The U.S. government tries to ensure anyone who knows of the Machine's existence is killed, including Nathan. Horrified and alone, Harold is permanently injured in the same deliberate bomb that kills Nathan, and he realizes if anyone learns of his existence, that he was the one who really built the Machine, he would endanger them. Wracked with devastating survivor's guilt, Harold lets his fiancée believe he died in the same bombing, and goes underground.
Harold becomes a reclusive billionaire operating out of a derelict New York City public library with dozens of bird-themed cover identities, trying to save one person at a time. The Machine detects acts of terror -- but in doing so, it sees everything, all acts of violence, and produces a list of numbers that the government deems "irrelevant", people about to be victim to or perpetrator of violence that isn't relevant to national security. Trying to help the irrelevant numbers is the pursuit that got Nathan killed, and Harold tries to take it on in his memory. But Harold quickly realizes that he has no hope of working the numbers alone, and after some trial and disastrous error ends up hiring John Reese, an abandoned ex-CIA black ops agent on a fast downward spiral.