So somebody found this Robert Downey Jr story weird.

I forget who: but the gist of it is as follows. Mark Zuckerberg designed an ‘AI*’ assistant – like you do – and he wants to get a voice for it (Zuckerberg is calling the ‘AI’ ‘Jarvis’). Enter Robert Downey (who gets to be in every Marvel movie from now on, if he likes), who replied:

I’ll do in a heartbeat if Bettany gets paid and donates it to a cause of Cumberbatch’s choosing…that’s the right kind of STRANGE!

Bettany is Paul Bettany, who is the voice of Jarvis/Vision in the Marvel movies, and you know perfectly well who Cumberbatch is.  Anyway… somebody found this potential deal weird, although I don’t. Zuckerberg gets Downey’s voice for his personal not-Siri.  Bettany gets a nice charitable-giving tax deduction for free. Cumberbatch gets to give money to some charity just before his next movie (which is a Marvel movie) comes out.  And Downey doesn’t have to get Zuckerberg, Bettany, and/or Cumberbatch Christmas presents this year.  It all seems perfectly reasonable to me

*It’s not a real AI. If it was a real AI, my wife would have told me about it two years ago.

3 thoughts on “So somebody found this Robert Downey Jr story weird.”

  1. Your logic is…inescapable.
    .
    I’m an only child, I’m incapable of grokking the whole of this without it being pointed out to me. As you do.

  2. It’s not a real AI.

    .

    Part of the problem here is we don’t have a good definition for what might qualify as “real AI”. IMO the “digital assistants” we’ve got now like Siri are starting to get into the fringes of a serviceable approximation. Even if there aren’t any major breakthroughs coming, I think 10 or 20 years of marginal improvements on what we have now will get us to something that feels very much like real AI.

  3. Like the saying goes, “a real AI would be smart enough to not let them know it was a AI”.

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