Every year on Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announces his ‘personal challenge’, which is how the Facebook billionaire describes his ‘new year’s resolution’. In the past you might’ve heard how Zuckerberg learned to speak Mandarin Chinese, which he later surprised Chinese politicians with by speaking during a meeting at the White House. He also made it his goal to read two books per month, a personal challenge he’s supposedly stuck by. Well, this year Zuck’s not only set his most ambitious personal challenge yet, but he’s set one that will (1) turn him into Tony Stark and (2) herald the end of civilization as we know it.
Zuck wants to ramp up the use of artificial intelligence in his life (AI), by creating his very own JARVIS, the electronic assistant that Tony Stark / Iron Man uses in The Avengers series…Here’s what Mark has to say about this year’s personal challenge (via Facebook):
Every year, I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook. My challenges in recent years have been to read two books every month, learn Mandarin and meet a new person every day.
My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.
I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there. Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on. I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I’ll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max’s room that I need to check on when I’m not with her. On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.
Every challenge has a theme, and this year’s theme is invention.
At Facebook I spend a lot of time working with engineers to build new things. Some of the most rewarding work involves getting deep into the details of technical projects. I do this with Internet.org when we discuss the physics of building solar-powered planes and satellites to beam down internet access. I do this with Oculus when we get into the details of the controllers or the software we’re designing. I do this with Messenger when we discuss our AI to answer any question you have. But it’s a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so this year my personal challenge is to do that.
This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself. I’m looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year.
He didn’t stop with the one post though, Mark Zuckerberg then (unusually) went on to respond to random stranger’s comments. He straight up dunked on some old lady who wants her grand daughters to take the easy way out in life:
And he went on to discuss his want/need for robots to carry out the most menial of tasks in his life:
…is it not amazing that he thinks the average human being will be able to afford AI controlled robots at some point within this current life cycle? I have to think it’s equal parts ‘billionaire forward thinking’ and ‘complete disconnect with reality’. Even if he were to roll out AI robots it’d still take 50 years (maybe a hundred) before retailers lowered prices enough for 99% of the population to afford them…Anyways, let’s move on.
If you take a few moments and scroll through the BroBible archives on posts about Artificial Intelligence then you’ll quickly see how fucking dangerous of a proposition this is for Zuck. The world’s foremost scientists have all cautioned against pursuing AI to the end, because it’ll inevitably mean a robot war that results in the overthrowing of man kind. This is an apocalypse that Mark Zuckerberg’s actively trying to bring about. So pack your bags, bros. It’s time to head out west and hole up somewhere in the mountains until it’s time to emerge and fight the robot armies of tomorrow.