Mark Zuckerberg’s robot butler would never work in my house

Zuckerberg has just become a father – a time when many wish they could take up a hobby

Mark Zuckerberg shared a photo of himself with his baby daughter on Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, has announced that his challenge for 2016 is to build his own robot butler. “You can think of it like Jarvis in Iron Man,” he added helpfully in his Facebook post. Or, as I prefer to think of it, like Niska from Channel 4’s robot-butler-gone-wrong drama Humans.

She was the “synth” who eventually became violent and resentful about lazy Homo sapiens making her do chores – often rude chores – and killed many of them with a blunt object. Oh, but there I am, flavouring Zuckerberg’s pledge with my very human capacity for worry, negativity and probably-no-can-do attitude. This is precisely why I am so vulnerable to being replaced in my own home by one of Zuckerberg’s diligent robot skivvies.

“I’ll start teaching it,” Zuckerberg says, “to understand my voice, to control everything in our home – music, lights, temperature and so on.” Here I spy a perilous threat to normal married/co-habiting life. Because how will couples survive without one of the partnership constantly touching the radiators moaning, “Are these on? Why? It’s 14 degrees in December.”

Or mooching about full of pithy rhetorical ire, moaning, “Is there any reason this house is lit up like Blackpool illuminations?” The Zuckerbot, as I’m naming it, will remove all these petty domestic niggles, allowing couples to concentrate on the whopping great unsolvable ones.

And let’s be frank, this Zuckerbot sounds like a hideous goody-goody. I can just see it, clip-clopping about the house smugly like C-3PO, making sure your other half’s Seasick Steve album is constantly blaring, which they love, but you hate, having identified it, accurately, as the sound of a drunk man at 3am in Victoria Coach Station.

“Why has the Zuckerbot been stuffed in the airing cupboard and why is the battery pack missing?” one’s partner might say in an accusatory tone. “I have no idea,” one might reply. In my house, there’s a strong chance the Zuckerbot would go the same way as my niece’s Furby, her evil, back-chatting, seemingly non-killable hamster/gremlin cohort. Namely, tolerated for five minutes, until Aunty Grace got all lemon-faced, wrapped it in tea-towels and chucked it in the shed.

Still, despite my Luddite naysaying, I feel Zuckerberg has every chance of not merely building this robot lackey, but rolling out his invention to everyday global consumers who will feel compelled to buy one. This is Mark Zuckerberg, for crying out loud. Here is the multi-billionaire whose company – due to sublime tax efficiency – paid £4,327 in UK corporation tax in 2014, while simultaneously being the No 1 UK internet destination for Corbynista blow-hards to hang out, all day long, snittering on about tax avoidance. That’s some serious Jedi mind-trickery. If Zuckerberg says he’s spending 2016 ushering in the era of our new synth overlords, I believe him.

It should also be noted that Zuckerberg is a brand new father of an eight-week-old daughter, which is precisely the time many parents – men and women – really wish they could take up a hobby or diverting project which allowed them to be far, far away from the whiff of the nappy bin, projectile poo and endless non-specific screeching. “Frank’s reeeally got into his cycling/election leafleting/organic allotment since we had the twins,” says many a woman with cracked nipples.

Zuckerberg already displayed one classic trait of the new parent last year by taking to Facebook with a wistful open letter to his new daughter, Max, where he sounded much like a cross between Deepak Chopra and Willy Wonka.

The Facebook founder is giving away most of his wealth, it seems, to make the world a better place. It was one of those “I got someone pregnant and, bang, now I’m Gandhi,” open letters that make non-breeders like myself want to hack off their own head with a Black & Decker Lopper and throw it in the road, but each to their own.

I’m not certain how sleep-deprived Zuckerberg was when he wrote this ‘“Giving it all away” Facebook update, but interestingly, one of the key aims in his later, “I’m building a robot” update was that his new buddy would eventually help with childcare. “I’ll teach it to know if there’s anything going on in Max’s room when I’m not with her,” Zuckerberg says.

This aspect might catch on as, because as far as I can tell, one of the major downsides of having children is the actual childcare. Namely, the fact that children pretty much need to be stared at constantly, and, if left unobserved for up to four minutes will set fire to the house, eat a battery and die, overheat and/or catch pneumonia or be duped into sending pictures of themselves to another child who is actually a bogeyman from a child-sex gang.

All of this can occur in the time it takes the average adult to nip to the toilet. And that’s where the Zuckerbot will be invaluable. For how many years little Max Zuckerberg will tolerate being under Stasi-like surveillance by a souped-up Magimix is anyone’s guess, but one can see the attraction for parents.

Of course the premise of Humans was that once we find the perfect house robot who knows what music, lighting and room temperature we like, who doesn’t quibble at menial chores and makes us feel secure, well, we end up falling in love and wanting to shag it. There’s software for that. These robots went like the clappers it seems. Eventually the “synths” began to sabotage the domestic bliss that we humans were searching for in the first place. But that was only a silly TV show, so let’s not worry too much.