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Is Artificial Intelligence like J.A.R.V.I.S. Possible?

If you are a fan of Marvel Comics or the Marvel Cinematic Universe,  you are likely aware of J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s personal artificial intelligence(AI) program. J.A.R.V.I.S. helps Tony Stark reach his full potential as Iron Man by helping run operations and diagnostics on the Iron Man suit, as well as gathering information and running simulations. J.A.R.V.I.S. also has a distinct personality, sometimes displaying sarcasm and wit, no doubt programmed in by Stark. With artificial intelligence and machine learning developing at a breakneck pace, it’s worth asking if an AI like J.A.R.V.I.S. is even possible.

One of the most prominent AI programs in use right now is IBM Watson. Watson made its debut in 2011 as a contestant on Jeopardy in a special broadcast against two of the show’s best contestants and won. Commercial use of Watson began in 2013.  Watson is now being used for a variety of functions from tracking elevator use in support of maintenance efforts, to planning irrigation systems for farms. (For more stories about Watson’s many jobs, look here.)

As far as hardware is concerned, Watson relies on a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers that each have a 3.5GHz processor, 16 terabytes of RAM. This allows Watson to process the equivalent of one million books per second. The estimated cost of Watson’s hardware was 300 million dollars.

When Watson competed on Jeopardy, all of the information Watson had access to had to be stored on the machine’s RAM because it would not have been able to access it within a competitive time frame if it was stored on the machine’s hard drive. Since Watson’s bout on Jeopardy, solid state drives have started to emerge, which would allow information that is used more often to be accessed at a faster rate than if the same information was stored on a standard hard drive. With further advances in memory storage technology, information could be accessed at faster rates.

IBM’s Watson appears to be a step in the direction toward AI similar to J.A.R.V.I.S. With quantum computing as an expanding frontier, processing speeds could become even faster, making something like J.A.R.V.I.S. a more realizable reality. Personally, I believe such a feat is possible, and could even be achieved in our lifetime.