When audiences around the world were introduced to the world of Iron Man, they were also introduced to JARVIS - Tony Stark's A.I. personal assistant who tracks his meetings, his visitors and even his playlists. As the franchise's popularity grew, so did the profile of the very useful machine, to the point where people wanted their own artificially intelligent companion. Well, it looks like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has lived up to his promise, as he's unveiled his own program, also named JARVIS. Though as you'll see in the video, Paul Bettany's voice isn't what he's envisioning as your guide around the house.
Zuckerberg released a video that serves as a sort of proof of concept onto the Facebook platform recently, and in case you were wondering, that was Morgan Freeman and Arnold Schwarzenegger you heard providing the two potential voices of JARVIS. As he was keen to point out in the comments below the video, what you've seen above is Mark Zuckerberg's way of summarizing his new tech toy, rather than a full demonstration. However, if Mark's able to deliver on half of what he's shown off in his summary, then Alexa and Siri are going to have a lot of competition on their hands.
Seeing the possibility of a fully-functioning A.I. is something movie fans have always simultaneously feared and dreamed of, ever since HAL 9000 made his chilling debut in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. While we're not quite at that level just yet, the advancement of artificial intelligence is undoubtedly something that's come about due to the advancement of our portrayal of such a construct in the movies. So as movie A.I. gets more sophisticated, it has ultimately inspired newer and better A.I. experiments in the real world. So thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's habit of raising the stakes with the capabilities of JARVIS, we might get to see something like this sequence from Iron Man 2 in our near future.
While we don't have any details on the launch of Mark Zuckerberg's JARVIS platform, he has done some live demos and will undoubtedly continue to work out any bugs that'll prevent the system from working to its full potential. Though apologies to any of you Nickelback fans, as we're not certain whether future releases will allow you to play their music through your home stereo system. We'll notify you when we hear anything more on that, or the platform on a whole.
