Mark Zuckerberg discusses his vision for the future of Facebook
During an online Q&A which featured questions from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about the future of the company in a discussion which covered the evolution of technology, workout routines and transgender issues.
During the hour-long session Zuckerberg touched on his vision of the “ultimate communication technology” which he hopes will allow people to send thoughts directly to each other. The social media figurehead admitted that he believed that “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. This would be the ultimate technology” he said.
New technologies such as photo recognition were also brought up in the session. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook is “building systems that can recognise everything that’s in an image or video" including people, objects and scenes. He also said that his goal was to “build AI systems that are better than humans at our primary senses: vision, listening etc”.
Stephen Hawking took the opportunity to ask the Facebook chief executive “which of the big questions in science would you like to know the answer to and why?” Zuckerberg replied that his focus was on people and so he would like to know: “What will enable us to live forever? How do we cure all diseases? How does the brain work? How does learning work and how can we empower humans to learn a million times more.”
Schwarzenegger was keen to know about Zuckerberg’s exercise routine and asked the 31 year-old “How do you find time to train and what is your regime like?” He replied that he works out three time a week when he first wakes up and goes running with his dog.
Alex Kantrowitz, a senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed, turned the conversation onto transgender issues. He said that Facebook’s real name policy is considered discriminatory by many transgender people, even putting their lives at risk, and asked if it would end.
The point was turned around by Zuckerberg who argued that it keeps users safe because “people are much less likely to act abusive towards other members of our community when they are using their real names”. He highlighted confusion about what the policy actually is, citing that the term ‘real name’ does not mean your legal name, rather the name that you go by.
Yesterday the company announced a new appointment hiring Google’s Andy Mihalop to head up the UK sales operation of its ad tech business Atlas.