Mark Zuckerberg wants to build an artificially intelligent assistant in 2016 to help run his home and assist him at work. In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg wrote that his personal challenge for the new year is to build a simple artificially intelligent assistant that run his home and help him with work “like Jarvis in Iron Man”.
Zuckerberg has made it a tradition to publicly announce a personal challenge outside of his Facebook work at the beginning of the year. Last year he challenged himself to read two books a month, founding a book club on Facebook. Over the years challenges have spanned learning Mandarin, meeting a new person every day, wearing a suit to work every day and only eating the meat from animals that he killed himself (to force himself to become vegetarian, of course).
Zuckerberg wrote that the theme for the year was invention.
“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 visualise data in VR (virtual reality) to help me build better services and lead my organisations more effectively,” he posted.
The post also makes a mention of the very controversial internet.org, now known by its new ‘Free Basics’ avatar, where Zuckerberg makes a mention of how he and the engineers at Facebook have been discussing “the physics of building solar-powered planes and satellites to beam down internet access”.
BW Reporters
Simar Singh is one of the youngest members of the BW team. A fresh graduate from IIMC, she also holds a degree in political science from LSR. She enjoys covering power, startups, lifestyle and a little bit of tech.
