Mark Zuckerberg Predicts the Future of Technology

By Jennifer Booton

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted some wild things at a town hall he hosted Tuesday night on his social network, including the ability for humans to one day talk to each other with their minds and for lasers to beam Internet access down to Earth.

His comments come at an interesting juncture for the social network, which continues to expand into new fields of technology as it moves beyond its core business.

Whether any or all of the below predictions — some taken straight out of science fiction — come to fruition remains to be seen. But with technology developing fast and Silicon Valley’s largest companies and entrepreneurs sitting on billions of dollars in cash, it is worth exploring.
Shares of Facebook FB climbed 1.2 percent to $86.74 in recent trading. They are up 27.5 percent over the last 12 months, compared with a 5 percent improvement for the broader S&P 500.
Here are five of his most mind-blowing predictions:

Virtual reality

Oculus, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $3 billion, is scheduled to release its first consumer-level, virtual-reality headset early next year, and expectations are high.

Analysts at PiperJaffray recently said it expects virtual reality to be the megatrend of the next 30 years, with Oculus leading the charge. They compared the market to the mobile phone industry of 15 years ago.

Facebook has already started to explore mechanisms of storytelling and communication through Oculus, but Zuckerberg said the future of this technology is going to be “pretty wild.”
“Our mission is to give people the power to experience anything, even if you don’t have the ability to travel somewhere, or to be with someone in person, or even if something is physically impossible to build in our analog world,” he said.

In the future, he expects people to share entire experiences through virtual reality, much as they share pictures of their vacations today.

“This will be incredibly powerful as a communication medium,” he said. “We’ll be able to capture whole 3-D scenes and create new environments and then share those with people.”

People will still carry phones in their pockets, at least for the next 10 years, he said, but they’ll also be wearing augmented-reality glasses to assist them on an everyday basis.

Telepathy

The next logical step beyond virtual reality will be telepathy, Zuckerberg said.

The Facebook chief can imagine a future where we don’t even need to speak to communicate. Technology has already enabled this with messaging, but Zuckerberg expects technology to evolve to a point that we can share whole thoughts and full “sensory and emotional” experiences telepathically.

“One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” he said. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like. This would be the ultimate communication technology.”

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