Mark Zuckerberg says the future of communication is telepathy. Here’s how that would actually work.

In a Q&A session with site users on June 30, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he envisions a world where people -- presumably Facebook users -- don’t need these types of communication intermediaries. Instead, they’ll communicate brain-to-brain, using telepathy. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” Zuckerberg wrote in response to a question about what’s next for Facebook. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too.”

But hold up: Is that even possible? And is that something anyone actually wants? How could we not only “read” a mind but also get that pattern of electrical signals into someone else’s head? Is Facebook currently developing any technology in this vein? Facebook’s Research division -- the arm of the company that studies machine learning, AI and virtual reality -- has not published any work on brain-to-brain communication and does not appear to employ any researchers in the field. But even if Facebook isn’t leading the charge toward telepathy -- a worrying concept, in itself, given the site’s past indiscretions regarding research consent and user privacy -- the field poses tons of ethical challenges, if only in theory.