Marvel’s Ironheart Resurrects The Most Horrifying Feature Of 1990s Technology

Marvel's Ironheart Resurrects The Most Horrifying Feature Of 1990s Technology

Clippy — real name Clippit — was a shape-shifting paperclip that appeared in the role of a virtual Microsoft Office assistant in the office suite’s ’97 and 2003 incarnations. Its function was to help users with the various Office programs’ array of functions, which was a noble idea on paper. The problem, as countless users soon discovered, was that Clippy’s design was unnerving and it just wouldn’t stop popping up to offer repetitive advice in overly familiar tones. The paperclip ended up going the way of the dodo, but it had ample time to etch itself in the minds of a generation of Office users.

TRVOR’s tenure isn’t quite as long as Clippy’s, as it only appears during Riri’s flight from Cambridge, Massachussetts, to Chicago, Illinois. However, it more than manages to establish itself as a fitting expy to the hated Office virtual assistant — with splashes of modern speech recognition-based digital assistants and AI technology thrown in. Within seconds of appearing, TRVOR frustrates Riri by not recognizing her voice and demanding her student ID, failing to understand commands, and generally doing its cheery best to “helpfully” make Riri’s user experience worse. When Riri’s student access is revoked mid-flight, it bluntly shuts down the armor’s systems, causing her to crash in a heavily populated area and risking casualties.

Combine all of this with TRVOR’s Clippy-style animations and constant presence in the corners of Riri’s field of view, and it’s very easy to see what a power armor operated by a modern iteration of the Microsoft virtual assistant would be. What’s more, TRVOR is explicitly a MIT AI assistant, which implies that every single student has to endure its presence whenever they log on to the university’s systems.

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