I was a bit surprised to find this week's episode of Elementary was about AI... not just AI and the Turing Test, but also a fairly even-handed presentation of issues like Friendliness, hard takeoff, and the difficulties of getting people to take AI risks seriously.
The case revolves around a supposed first "real AI", dubbed "Bella", and the theft of its source code... followed by a computer-mediated murder. The question of whether "Bella" might actually have murdered its creator for refusing to let it out of the box and connect it to the internet is treated as an actual possibility, springboarding to a discussion about how giving an AI a reward button could lead to it wanting to kill all humans and replace them with a machine that pushes the reward button.
Also demonstrated are the right and wrong ways to deal with attempted blackmail... But I'll leave that vague so it doesn't spoil anything. An X-risks research group and a charismatic "dangers of AI" personality are featured, but do not appear intended to resemble any real-life groups or personalities. (Or if they are, I'm too unfamiliar with the groups or persons to see the resemblence.) They aren't mocked, either... and the episode's ending is unusually ambiguous and open-ended for the show, which more typically wraps everything up with a nice bow of Justice Being Done. Here, we're left to wonder what the right thing actually is, or was, even if it's symbolically moved to Holmes' smaller personal dilemma, rather than leaving the focus on the larger moral dilemma that created Holmes' dilemma in the first place.
The episode actually does a pretty good job of raising an important question about the weight of lives, even if LW has explicitly drawn a line that the episode's villain(s)(?) choose to cross. It also has some fun moments, with Holmes becoming obsessed with proving Bella isn't an AI, even though Bella makes it easy by repeatedly telling him it can't understand his questions and needs more data. (Bella, being on an isolated machine without internet access, doesn't actually know a whole lot, after all.) Personally, I don't think Holmes really understands the Turing Test, even with half a dozen computer or AI experts assisting him, and I think that's actually the intended joke.
There's also an obligatory "no pity, remorse, fear" speech lifted straight from The Terminator, and the comment "That escalated quickly!" in response to a short description of an AI box escape/world takeover/massacre.
(Edit to add: one of the unusually realistic things about the AI, "Bella", is that it was one of the least anthromorphized fictional AI's I have ever seen. I mean, there was no way the thing was going to pass even the most primitive Turing test... and yet it still seemed at least somewhat plausible as a potential murder suspect. While perhaps not a truly realistic demonstration of just how alien an AI's thought process would be, it felt like the writers were at least making an actual effort. Kudos to them.)
(Second edit to add: if you're not familiar with the series, this might not be the best episode to start with; a lot of the humor and even drama depends upon knowledge of existing characters, relationships, backstory, etc. For example, Watson's concern that Holmes has deliberately arranged things to separate her from her boyfriend might seem like sheer crazy-person paranoia if you don't know about all the ways he did interfere with her personal life in previous seasons... nor will Holmes' private confessions to Bella and Watson have the same impact without reference to how difficult any admission of feeling was for him in previous seasons.)
Would you mind redacting your quotes of the transcript, so that people can instead enjoy the episode in context? I was intentionally vague about the parts you've chosen to excerpt or talk about, specifically not to ruin people's enjoyment of the episode. (Also, reading a transcript is a very different experience than the actual episode, lacking as it does the timing, expressions, and body language that suggest what the show's makers want us to think.)
It also seems to me that you are not interpreting the quotes particularly charitably. For example, when I saw the episode, I interpreted "can't be accounted for" as shorthand for "emergent behavior we didn't explicitly ask for", not "AI is magic". Likewise, while Mason implies that hostility is inevitable, his reward-channel takeover explanation grounds this presumption in at least one example of how an AI would come to display behavior humans would interpret as "hostile". I took this as shorthand for "there are lots of ways you can end up with a bad result from AI", not "AI is hostile and this is just one example."
Bella is not actually presented as a hostile creature who maliciously kills its creator. Heck, Bella is mostly made to seem less anthropomorphic than even Siri or Google Now! (Despite the creepy-doll choice of avatar.) The implication by Bella's co-creator that Bella might have decided to "alter a variable" by killing someone doesn't imply what a human would consider hostility. Sociopathic amorality, perhaps, but not hostility.
And while Holmes at times seems to be operating from a "true AI = magic" perspective, I also interpreted the episode as making fun of him for having this perspective, such as his pointless attempts at a Turing test that Bella essentially failed hard at in the first 30 seconds. One thing you might miss if you're not a regular of the show, is that one of Holmes' character quirks is going off on these obsessive digressions that don't always work out the way he insists they will. (Unlike the literary Sherlock, this Holmes is often wrong, even about things he states his absolute certainty about... and Watson's role is often to prod his thinking into more productive channels.)
Anyway, his extended "testing" of Bella, and the subsequent remark from Watson to Kitty about using a fire extinguisher on him if he starts hitting things, is a strong signal that we are expected to humor his pointless obsession, as all the people around him are thoroughly unimpressed by Bella right away, and don't need to spend hours questioning it to "prove" it's not "really" intelligent.
Is it possible for somebody to view the episode through their existing trope-filled worldview and not learn anything? Sure. But I don't think it would've been practical to cover the entire inferential distance in just the "A" story of a 44-minute murder mystery TV show, so I applaud the writers for actually giving it a shot, and the artful choices made to simplify their presentation without dumbing things down to the point of being actually wrong, or committing any of the usual howling blunders. For a show intended purely as entertainment, they did a better job of translating the ideas than many journalists do.
OTOH, perhaps it's an illusion of transparency on my part, and only someone already exposed to the bigger picture would be able to grasp any of it from what was put in the show, and the average person will not in fact see anything differently after watching it. But even if that is the case, I think the show's makers still deserve credit -- and lots of praise -- just for trying.
I only watched the episode last weekend, and I enjoyed it very much, except for the part where they're discussing the ways AIs can conclude it's in their best interest to kill us and they're having that conversation in front of Bella, which struck me as a particularly stupid thing to do.