Technology leaders such as Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have warned that rogue AI, or artificial intelligence, could one day threaten the human race.

科技行业领袖，如特斯拉汽车公司(Tesla Motors)的埃隆氠斯克(Elon Musk)和风险投资家彼得泰尔(Peter Thiel)，都曾警告称，失控的人工智能(AI)有一天可能威胁人类。

But Mark Zuckerberg has set himself the challenge this year of building his own personal AI assistant, describing fears of a super-intelligence running amok as “far-fetched”.

但是，马克丠克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)今年设定的个人挑战恰恰是构建自己的AI个人助理，他表示，对超级智能失控的恐惧是“缺乏依据的”。

In a post on his company’s website on Sunday, the Facebook founder said he had decided to build a smart machine to control functions in his house and help him work, akin to a disembodied butler. He compared it with Jarvis, an intelligent computer in the Iron Man films.

这位Facebook创始人周日在Facbook上发帖称，他已决定造一台智能机器来控制自家住宅的各项功能，并且帮助他工作，类似于一个无形的管家。他将其与《钢铁侠》(Iron Man)电影中的智能电脑贾维斯(Jarvis)相提并论。

Mr Zuckerberg regularly sets himself personal challenges at the start of the year. Past ones have included meeting a new person every day, reading two books a month and learning Mandarin.

扎克伯格每年初都为自己设定个人挑战。往年的挑战包括每天结识一个新人，每个月读两本书，以及学习中文普通话。

But this year’s resolution is the first to involve a software coding test with such a direct bearing on Facebook’s future. The company already has two teams working on artificial intelligence — one that focuses on pure research and another that looks at ways to apply AI to the social network.

但是，他今年的新年决心首次涉及一场软件编码测试，直接关系到Facebook的未来。该公司已有两个团队研究人工智能：一个专注于纯理论研究，另一个研究如何将AI应用于社交网络。

The challenge also highlights the AI race that has broken out among the leading internet companies as they try to invent new ways for people to interact with machines. Facebook has set up three artificial intelligence labs, in Silicon Valley, New York and Paris, and its high-profile hires in the field include Yann LeCun, a New York University professor who was one of the pioneers in deep learning — a form of AI that tries to mimic the functioning of layers of neurons in the human brain.

这项挑战也凸显出，领先的互联网公司之间已经展开一场AI竞赛，试图发明人与机器互动的新方式。Facebook已经在硅谷、纽约和巴黎建立了三个人工智能实验室，其在该领域挖来的知名人才包括纽约大学(New York University)教授、深度学习的先驱之一扬勒坎(Yann LeCun)；深度学习是人工智能的一种形式，试图模仿人类大脑神经元层的功能。

Mr Zuckerberg said his work at Facebook often involved getting into deep technical issues with the company’s engineers, and that building his own intelligent machine would bring a different perspective to that work.

扎克伯格表示，他在Facebook的工作往往涉及与公司的工程技术人员深入探讨技术问题，构建自己的智能机器将为这方面的工作带来一个不同的视角。

He described his personal project as “a simple AI”, taking an off-the-shelf system and teaching it to recognise his voice to “control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on”.

他把自己的个人项目称为“一个简单的AI”，涉及采用一台现成系统，然后教会它听懂他的语音，以便“控制我们家中的一切——音乐、灯光、温度等等”。

He also said he was interested in using voice and face recognition so the machine could identify who was in a room, for instance adjusting the temperature to reflect the fact that he prefers colder rooms compared with his wife. Mr Zuckerberg added that he intended to teach the system to turn data into visual representations that he could see with a virtual reality headset.

他还表示，他有兴趣使用语音和脸部识别，使机器能够识别是谁在房间里，然后据此发挥功能，例如调节室内温度，顾及他与太太相比偏爱较低室温的事实。扎克伯格补充说，他打算教会该系统把数据转化为可视形式，让他能够用一台虚拟现实头盔观看。

Hermann Hauser, a Cambridge-based computer scientist and entrepreneur, said that recent advances in machine learning algorithms, computing power and availability of huge amounts of data, have combined to allow computer engineers to create AI systems.

剑桥计算机科学家和企业家赫尔曼樠泽(Hermann Hauser)表示，机器学习算法、电脑运算能力和海量数据可用性方面的最新进展相结合，让电脑工程师能创建各种AI系统。

“[Mr Zuckerberg’s] is a perfectly realistic aim,” he said. But Dr Hauser was concerned that only Silicon Valley’s largest companies could access the level of information necessary to create functioning AI.

“（扎克伯格的目标）是一个完全可实现的目标，”他说。但豪泽博士担忧，只有硅谷大牌企业才能获取创建实用AI所需的那种水平的信息。