From your brainwaves to your internet: here is all the tech that Facebook plans to dominate in 10 years
- At Facebook's F8 developer's conference, the company once again showcased its ambitious 10-year roadmap.
- Its plans go way beyond sharing photos, news articles and messages.
- Facebook plans includes building and own internet access, from the equipment to the satellites to the undersea cables.
- It is also still working on making computers think for themselves and "brain computer interfaces" that let you control the digital world with your thoughts.
At Facebook's F8 developer's conference, the company once again showcased its ambitious 10-year roadmap that shows all the ways it plans to dominate our technological lives in the years to come.
Its plans go far beyond sharing photos and news articles and sending messages to friends.
The roadmap showcases some familiar items already offered by Facebook, including the main Facebook social networking service, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger (including Messenger bots for interacting with businesses -- found through the "explore" tab.)
But there are also lesser known areas like Workplace, Facebook's Slack competitor, a product based on how Facebook's own employees use Facebook to communicate at work. And the latest version of the roadmap now includes Marketplace, an alternative to Craigslist for buying and selling stuff. Of course, there's also Facebook Video -- which includes live videos and original shows.
Facebook plans to offer internet connectivity services:
Facebook's roadmap is also interesting for the ambitious projects that are still on it since the last time we got a peek at it. Despite a turbulent period in which Facebook has come under fire for privacy issues and its mishandling of user data, the roadmap makes clear that the company has not given up on its big bets.
For instance, Facebook still has big plans for satellite and high altitude internet connectivity, even although we've heard little about its satellite plans since Elon Musk's SpaceX blew up Facebook's $200 million satellite in 2016. The satellite was intended to provide internet to parts of Africa.
And we also haven't heard much about Facebook's internet solar-powered drone Aquila since its second test flight in May of 2017. (An early drone crashed in 2016.)
Business Insider's Rob Price recently uncovered Facebook's plans to test experimental wireless technology in the New Mexico desert that looks to be related to the drone project.
Facebook is still going strong, and talking about, its Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP). That's Facebook's plans to eat a $350 billion telecom equipment market. A good 500 companies are now a part of this project to build faster, cheaper, open source telecom hardware. In February, Facebook also announced plans to build various open hardware for cellular mobile networks, too.
Meanwhile, Facebook is also installing its own fiber cables, instead of leasing it on the networks already installed underground. It's also laying its own undersea cables, teaming up with other internet companies like Softbank, Amazon, Microsoft.
Will it one day offer affordable high speed internet services? The roadmap hints that it may. It certainly will one day be powerful enough to do so, owning all of the equipment itself.
Facebook is working on artificial intelligence:
Facebook still has AI tech as a major part of its roadmap.
It is building machine "vision" systems that can recognize a photo and take action. This ranges from recognizing your face in a photo, to tools it has open sourced that allow developers to train their apps how to recognize things in photos.
Facebook is also building "unsupervised learning" and generative network AI machines. These are computers that can learn and get better as they are exposed ot more data, but they also train themselves on how well they are learning.
If Skynet ever becomes a real possibility, unsupervised learning and generative networks would be its forefathers.
Facebook is working on virtual reality and augmented reality:
Facebook's roadmap still calls out "social presence" which is a virtual world so detailed it replicates the real world, right down to gestures, facial movements, even your lips moving as you speak. Think "Ready Player One."
It is also working on 'brain computer interfaces" which basically means technology that can read your mind.
Last year, at F8 Facebook showcased technology called "silent speech interfaces," which can read the words you form in your mind without saying them aloud.
A few months after Facebook unveiled the brain computing efforts, Regina Dugan, the leader of Facebooks far-out Building 8 R&D lab, left Facebook, after only 18 months. But according to the chart, Facebook is still pursuing brain computing interface, or BCI, technology.
Here's a look at how Facebook's 10-year roadmap has evolved.
This is the roadmap Facebook showed off in 2016 at its F8 conference:
And here is the current roadmap:
