In the future, Facebook will be self aware and available everywhere.
At least that's what Mark Zuckerberg is hoping his social network will become. In a Monday Facebook Q&A, the CEO fielded questions from users and a few famous faces about virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the real story behind its "real name" policy.
When Zuckerberg thinks AI, he focuses on "understanding the meaning of what people share," he wrote.
"If you take a photo of a dog or write a post about politics, we should understand that so we can show that post and help you connect to people who like dogs and politics," Zuckerberg said.
To get there, Facebook needs to be "better than humans at our primary senses"—from recognizing things in photos or videos to translating speech and text. It won't happen tomorrow, but "I hope we can deliver it in the next 10 years," Zuckerberg wrote.
Also in the cards for Facebook over the next decade is getting its money's worth from the $2 billion Oculus VR acquisition.
"We're working on VR because I think it's the next major computing and communication platform after phones," Zuckerberg said. "In the future we'll probably still carry phones in our pockets, but I think we'll also have glasses on our faces that can 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."
For example, Zuckerberg believes that "video will be even more important than photos"
"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," he predicted.
Facebook will also continue its effort to get more people online via Internet.org.
"In the next 10 years, Internet.org has the potential to help connect hundreds of millions or billions of people who do not have access to the Internet today," he wrote. "Research has found that for every 10 people who gain access to the Internet, about 1 person is raised out of poverty. So if we can connect the 4 billion people in the world who are unconnected, we can potentially raise 400 million people out of poverty. That's perhaps one of the greatest things we can do in the world."
For now, though, one of the controversies Facebook faced last year was its "real name" policy. The social network has long required people to use their actual names to prevent too many fake accounts from diluting the service. But it made headlines when Facebook forced some California drag queens to stop using their stage names on personal profiles.
Facebook eventually apologized, and Zuckerberg said this week that nicknames and stage names are allowed.
"Your real name is whatever you go by and what your friends call you," he wrote. "If your friends all call you by a nickname and you want to use that name on Facebook, you should be able to do that. In this way, we should be able to support everyone using their own real names, including everyone in the transgender community. We are working on better and more ways for people to show us what their real name is so we can both keep this policy which protects so many people in our community while also serving the transgender community."