Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of a company that has rendered our face-to-face interaction essentially unnecessary, shared in a Facebook post yesterday that he wants to build an AI to "run my home and help me with my work." Like an assistant, but not. "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," he said. The AI will take on the responsibilities of caring for his child, protecting his home from intruders, and "help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively." Tech goals, honestly.
This all reads pretty harmless but somehow inspired someone's embarrassing grandma to chime on the comments with some frankly sexist garbage. The top liked comment in the thread, it reads, "I keep telling my grand daughters to Date the nerd in school, he may turn out to be a Mark Zuckerberg! Thanks for FB, I've reconnected with family and many old friends and classmates." Ugh.
Mark, humble man of the people (and low-key feminist?), decided to comment back. "Even better would be to encourage them to *be* the nerd in their school so they can be the next successful inventor!" Even Better! We'll let slide that the pervasive sexism that consumes Silicon Valley makes it damn near impossible for women to reach Zuckerberg-level world domination, but I'm sure he's doing his part to advance the careers of women within his own company. Definitely.
