Zuckerberg Is Building a Home JARVIS, and Arnold Schwarzenegger Wants to Be Its Voice

Mark Zuckerberg is building an “Iron Man”-style JARVIS to run his house.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger has offered to be the voice.

Facebook’s founder posted his New Year’s resolution over the weekend, saying that the “simple” artificial intelligence he’ll build and personally code will “run my home and help me with my work.” He outlined some of its intended features in the post and in replies to commenters:

• “I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home – music, lights, temperature and so on.”

• He told one commenter who asked which music gadgets/services he’d be testing first: “For just music, the Amazon Echo is pretty great. It’s been very useful for controlling music with my voice while both hands are occupied taking care of Max. I’ve also been impressed with how much free music comes with Amazon Prime. That said, I only have an Echo in one room and it doesn’t have all my music, so it’s not perfect yet.”

• “I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell.”

• “I’ll be able to interact with it like a person: I’ll talk to it, it can see me and my facial expressions, it’ll be able to predict some of what I need ahead of time, etc.”

• “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.” His wife, Priscilla Chan, gave birth to their first child, daughter Max, in late November.

• “I’m very interested in using voice and face recognition to set lights and temperature as well depending on who is in what rooms, etc. For example, I like rooms colder than Cilla,” so perhaps his system will be able to “just see who is in what room and adjust the temperatures automatically.”

• “On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR [virtual reality] to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.”

His plan has been greeted enthusiastically by his Facebook following — and a little incredulously by those of us who thought he might already have his hands full, what with caring for a newborn and launching the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and, you know, running the world’s biggest social network. But it seems he thought this would be a “fun intellectual challenge.”

If you’re interested in following the project, keep an eye on Zuck’s Facebook page: “I’m planning on writing an update about once a month,” he told one commenter, “but it’ll more likely be whenever I have real progress to share.”

He did take care to clarify for another commenter, though, that “it’s not a new company — just a personal challenge on the side to learn new things and create a simple AI for myself.” He said he wanted to focus solely on his own home because every home is so different.

A few commenters asked about the risk of “AI becoming so intelligent that it could run the world like in movies,” but he replied that he wasn’t too worried. “I think we can build AI so it works for us and helps us. Some people fear-monger about how AI is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”

Just don’t inadvertently create Skynet! one commenter warned, referring to the Terminator movie franchise’s self-aware AI villain, which unleashed the lethal Terminators to wipe out the threat that humanity posed to Skynet’s existence. “I’ll be careful,” Zuck promised, adding a smiley emoticon for extra reassurance.

But in an ominous turn, the original Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, offered: “If you need a voice, you know where to find me.”

“Amazing,” Zuck replied. “Now I just need to find a reason for my AI to say ‘Get to the chopper!’”

In any event, Zuckerberg says he’s open to suggested names for his home AI.

… And if this is sounding a little familiar to you, it’s not your imagination. A couple of months ago, the Wall Street Journal visited with a guy who’s also building a JARVIS — in his case, “Jeremy’s Astute Residential Virtual Intelligent System,” shown in the video here.

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