Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, just dropped a big hint about the future of the social network. He envisions a world in which we will share our thoughts directly using technology. This brain to brain communication will be a form of telepathy, only supported by the advances in technology.
The ultimate communication technology will allow users to just think of something and immediately be able to share the experience with your friends. Zuckerberg shared his vision for the future on Tuesday afternoon, on his Facebook account, during a public Q&A session. When one of the users asked him about Facebook's long-term plans, Facebook's CEO gave a hint about the ways virtual reality on Facebook will make users feel like they are experiencing and seeing everything in real time, sitting right next to their friends.
Facebook social network has expanded in the past decade the way users communicate on its platform. At first, the only means of communication was plain profile pages. Next, users experience on Facebook has been enhanced through various means, including Comments, Likes, the Wall, Likes, News Feed, Timeline, and Groups.
Facebook moved over the last year to a greater focus on personal messaging and away from mass sharing. For this purpose, it introduced the Messenger as its own separate app for both the web and mobile. In order to use their expertise in online messaging apps, Facebook even bought WhatsApp, an entire messaging platform.
Facebook gave us a hint of its plans for the future with its Oculus acquisition. The company wants to use virtual reality in order to make users share experiences with their friends in a virtual world. From this, it is deemed that using telepathy is just a step away. Brain to brain connections are no longer just another far-fetched dream. There are already ongoing studies on how to create "computer brain interfaces". Computers will soon gain the ability for computers to translate brain waves into software commands.
Scientists at the University of Washington, for instance, are working on a project to design a system that allows the use of the Internet in sending brain signals from one person to another. During the experiments, one participant, just through a thought, has successfully moved the second participant's finger on a keyboard. Both participants at the experiment were wearing special hats equipped with electrodes.
Until today, scientific research has been limited mainly to motion commands. However, Zuckerberg and other like-minded technology entrepreneurs have more ambitious goals. They are looking forward to ways of communication with computers or with other people through the Internet, without using voice or a keyboard. They hope to revolutionize human communication in innovative ways that will make a great impact on our daily lives.
