Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has some strong opinions on the future. Source: Getty Images

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 of cash, it is worth exploring.

Shares of Facebook FB, climbed 1.2% to $86.74 in recent trade. They are up 27.5% over the last 12 months, compared with a 5% improvement for the broader S & P 500.

Here are five of his most mind-blowing predictions:

A whole new world, a new fantastic point of view. Source: AFP

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.

Are you picking up what I am putting out. Source: News Corp Australia

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.”

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s just a human from the future. Source: Supplied

Superhuman

In response to a question by Stephen Hawking regarding the biggest questions in science he would like to see answered, Zuckerberg said he was most interested in questions related to people, particularly how our minds work, and how we can reach super-intelligence and immortality.

“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?” he said.

Zuckerberg was also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we care about.

“I bet there is,” he said.

Blade Runner esentailly predicted the future in 1982. Source: News Limited

Artificial Intelligence

Speaking of super-intelligence, Zuckerberg touched on the company’s use of artificial intelligence, and how it may shape the platform in the future.

Facebook’s research in this area currently focuses on understanding the context of individual posts so that its algorithms can determine the best way to sort them.

But the ultimate goal is to build artificial intelligence systems so advanced that they can see or hear things as well as, or better than, humans can, according to Zuckerberg.

For vision, they may be able to recognise everything in an image or video, from people to objects and scenes. They’ll be able to understand the “content of the images and videos,” he said.

While these will help improve the Facebook News Feed experience, Zuckerberg is expecting artificial intelligence to serve more advanced functions, such as giving computers the ability to describe images to a blind person.

“If we could build computers that could understand what’s in an image and could tell a blind person who otherwise couldn’t see that image, that would be pretty amazing,” he said.

It’s something Facebook hopes to deliver within the decade.

I had a weather changing machine that was, in essence, a sophisticated heat beam which we called a “laser”. Source: News Limited

Laser Beams

Zuckerberg has long expressed an interest in giving internet access to everyone on Earth through Facebook’s non-profit organisation, Internet.org.

The company is currently striking partnerships with operators to deliver free basic internet services around the world.

Google Inc. has also tried to tackle this issue with technology, testing high-altitude solar balloons through Project Loon that would sit high above rural areas.

But despite these efforts, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population is without internet access.

In the future, Zuckerberg believes that technological innovation in the form of drones, satellites and lasers will tip the scales further.

“The idea is that in the future, we’ll be able to beam down internet access from a plane flying overhead or a satellite flying way overhead — and they’ll communicate down to earth using very accurate lasers to transfer data,” he said.