What was your wish for 2016?

Perhaps it was to build a successful startup, quit smoking, get fit, or one of any number of regulars, but did your list include building an Artificially Intelligent (AI) butler?

If you answered no to that question, that would be because you’re not Mark Zuckerberg, who has as his goal in 2016 to build an AI butler like that of Jarvis in the Iron Man movies.

Zuckerberg took to Facebook to describe his goal for the year, writing that his personal challenge of building an AI butler would be to help him running both his home and his work life, the latter likely making some of his personal assistants at Facebook somewhat nervous about their ongoing employment.

“I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on.”

Because home voice control is old hat (think Amazon Echo), he doesn’t stop there: “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 [my daughter] 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.”

After mentioning various work challenges, including building AI for Facebook’s Messenger app, Zuckerberg explains the why: “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.”

Why not indeed?

It could be said that when you’re one of the richest men in tech that building your own AI butler is something you have both the money, and perhaps the time, to indulge in.

And for Zuckerberg, why not indeed?

Learning something new and exploring new ways technology can improve your life has been the guiding principle of every wave of technological advancement since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

It may seem on the surface to be somewhat of a flight of fancy, but if it’s something he finds interesting and wants to play with, no one is entitled to begrudge him that. And who knows, maybe he will successfully build it, turn it into a new company, and by 2020 we’ll all have our own Jarvis AI butler in our homes … well, here’s hoping anyway.

Image credit: Iron Man/Marvel/Disney