October 15 - The Future, as Imagined by Google

In Eric E. Schmidt’s future, his life will be a lot easier. His bed will wake him up when he cycles out of R.E.M. sleep. A driverless car will take him to work. Returning phone calls, scheduling events and other routine tasks will be taken care of by devices using artificial intelligence. A microrobot he swallows will monitor his insides and alert his doctor if something is wrong. At night, a robot will go to parties in his place. “He’ll have a good time and report back in the morning,” said Mr. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, speaking Monday at the company’s Zeitgeist sales conference in Paradise Valley, Ariz.

Mr. Schmidt was describing to Google’s biggest advertisers and partners how technology can change the world, from tracking financial assets to education to measuring the results of nonprofit initiatives. Some of the things he mentioned, like universal language translation and artificial intelligence, are Google projects.

More important than making his daily life easier, he said, technology will open up the world to people who have never been connected, like those in developing countries. "Imagine going from no information to all the world’s information with one device,” he said. “No textbooks to all textbooks. No language to all language.”

For companies like Google, billions of people newly connected also means a new source of talent, Mr. Schmidt said.

Google and other tech companies will have succeeded, he said, when none of this seems magical, or even visible, because technology will imbue everything in our lives, which is a theme of Google's.

“Eventually technology just disappears,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s the ultimate achievement. No more ports and prompts and plug-ins.”