You’re walking down the street and your smartphone reminds you of your appointments, notes nearby sales of those shoes you’ve been searching for, and points out that your ex-girlfriend is in the restaurant on the corner. That’s the heavenly — or hellish — vision of the future of computing presented by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference this week.
He called it “a serendipity engine,” and suggested it will be among a variety of new services that will help to “make your life just work.”
‘Amazing’ That Humans Drive Cars
In the brave new world now emerging with smart mobile devices, fast broadband, and powerful cloud computing, Schmidt said users will never be lonely because some friend will always be online. He also said users will never be bored because of the vast amount of online information and entertainment.
There’s a catch, of course. People need to share information about themselves so the search giant and others can better direct content and functions. Schmidt described the current debate over privacy — which presumably includes the heavy criticism directed at, and some legal investigations of, Google — as “healthy” because the massive databases about virtually everyone need to be managed carefully.
But Schmidt’s view of the future isn’t limited to helping you remember where you put your car keys. In fact, in his future the car is the driver, not you.
“It’s amazing to me that we let humans drive cars,” he told the conference. He said it’s “a bug that cars were invented before computers,” and computers should do the driving so humans can sit back and do whatever they need to do while getting from one destination to another. Computers should “help us do the things we are not very good at,” Schmidt said, and humans should likewise help our bit-processing…