The Future According to Schmidt: "Augmented Humanity," Integrated Into Google (via Fast Company)

Schmidt got to the good stuff: The future is mobile, he thinks, driven by the “device of our time,” the smartphone—and the tablet. Children now have two states of existence, aided by this trend—“asleep or online.” Within two years Schmidt sees smartphone sales outstripping desktop PC sales, and the mobile sector is growing eight times faster than traditional PCs did at the same stage in their evolution. Soon the majority of online action will happen from mobile devices, and landlines will effectively be dead for phone-call purposes.

Then Schmidt got brave: Unconnected devices today are “no longer interesting,” he thinks. Soon everything, but everything, will be hooked up to everything over wireless nets. A good example of the phenomena this enables, Schmidt said, is Google’s recent efforts at a spoken-word universal speech translator app—which connects to many, many servers over the Net to give you access to near real-time voice recognition and translation.

Computers, Schmidt thinks, can, when used ubiquitously and interactively and with cloud-like access to remote supercomputer powers can give us “senses” we didn’t know were possible. “Think of it as augmented humanity” he suggested.

Electricity x Telephony x Cubism x Pop x Internet = Augment Humanity?

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