There will come a time when smartphones will be an obsolete thing of the past if Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg succeeds with his ambitious 10-year plan. The internet entrepreneur first revealed his roadmap in April 2016, with barely any specifics. But at last week's F8 conference, the biggest social media platform's co-creator offered more details with regard to his strategy.
At the end of the line, everyone in the world will have access to an internet connection. If Facebook has its way, then a lot of people will do so through the social media company's connectivity branch, Internet.org. At the same time, AI systems will be smart enough to talk with humans as if they were also humans, Business Insider writes. Lastly, there will come a time when people will live in a world where computing is done without screens.
And the last part of Zuckerberg's game plan heralds the death of smartphones. Working, entertaining and socializing through mobile phones, television sets, computers or anything else with a screen will become archaic. It will be superseded by smart glasses that would do this.
According to Michael Abrash of Oculus research, the world is only five years away from having augmented reality smart glasses. In fact, Zuckerberg and co. are already developing a technology that would allow people to type, point and click with their brains (via the smart glasses, of course). To give everyone an idea of what that would be like, the Menlo Park company turns phones into AR devices with the help of the Camera Effects platform.
However, as exciting as it may be to live in an AR/VR world, ZDNet points out potential problems. Privacy is the biggest caveat. Facebook, or any other company for that matter, could tap into people's brains without them knowing. Intermediaries could know what consumers see, hear or even think through the technology they provide. The question of privacy already arose with the advent of smartphones and they have not even been solved yet.
Nevertheless, the world is already fast approaching the time when the real world and the digital space mix up. Smartphones will become fossils, and even now they have already paved the way to their deaths (by incorporating VR functions to their systems). When that happens, Facebook will play a key role in different aspects of people's lives.
