Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a Townhall Q&A session this week to hear what the Facebook community had to say.
He personally answered questions from Facebook users for an hour and the answers provide insight into what the tech giant is potentially developing.
Facebook user Marcel Rukeltukel asked: "What's going on with Facebook in the future?" Zuckerberg highlighted a few trends.
"People are gaining the power to share in richer and richer ways. We used to just share in text, and now we post mainly with photos. In the future, video will be even more important than photos. After that, immersive experiences like virtual reality (VR) will become the norm. And after that, we'll have the power to share our full sensory and emotional experience with people whenever we'd like."
Zuckerberg predicted: "One day, I believe we'll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. 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."
Ben Romberg asked about Facebook's artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. Zuckerberg said: "Our AI research is focused on understanding the meaning of what people share.
"For example, if you take a photo that has a friend in it, then we should make sure that friend sees it. If you take a photo of a dog or write a post about politics, we should understand that... and help you connect to people who like dogs and politics. In order to do this really well, our goal is to build AI systems that are better than humans at our primary senses: vision, listening, etc.
"For vision, we're building systems that can recognise everything that's in an image or a video... These systems need to understand the context of the images as well as whatever is in them." Zuckerberg said this was a basic overview and he will share more on the topic soon.
Jenni Moore asked where Zuckerberg predicts, from a technology and social media perspective, the world will be in 10 years' time.
He says VR will be a big part of the next decade: "In the future, we'll probably still carry phones in our pockets, but I think we'll also have glasses on our faces that help us out throughout the day and give us the ability to share our experiences with those we love in completely immersive and new ways that aren't possible today."
Scientist Stephen Hawking also contributed to the conversation, asking which of the big questions in science Zuckerberg would like to know the answer to. Zuckerberg said he would be interested in finding out how people could live forever and: "Whether there is a fundamental mathematical law, underlying human social relationships, that governs the balance of who and what we all care about."
Another notable celebrity, Arnold Schwarzenegger, also chimed in, asking the CEO how he managed to exercise while being so busy.
Other questions from Facebook users included: "Don't you think Facebook might be the cause of billions of working-hours being wasted each year?" and "Can we have a 'love' button?"
The session was littered with numerous requests for jobs at the tech company and appeals from start-ups for mentorship, to which Zuckerberg linked to the Facebook Careers portal.
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