Google chairman: 6 predictions for our digital future

Thanks to Will for passing this along.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has been thinking a lot about our digital future.

Maybe that's not a big surprise for a man whose company has played a major role in shaping our 21st-century lives, from how we find information to how we use our phones.

It's that role, perhaps, that has made Schmidt's new book, "The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business," so widely anticipated.

The book, out Tuesday, is co-written with Jared Cohen, a former U.S. State Department terrorism adviser who now heads up Google Ideas, the company's think tank. In it, the authors consider what our world will be like when everyone on Earth is connected digitally. (Schmidt believes this will happen by the end of the decade).

A universal Web, the authors say, will be an inevitable outcome of a world that's increasingly being driven by technology. But instead of an ominous sci-fi vision of a planet run by robot overlords, they envision a world that will be shaped, for better or worse, by us.

"This is a book about technology, but even more, it's a book about humans and how humans interact with, implement, adapt to and exploit technologies in their environment, now and in the future ...," they write. "For all the possibilities that communication technologies represent, their use for good or ill depends solely on people. Forget all the talk about machines taking over. What happens in the future is up to us."

Here are six predictions Schmidt and Cohen make about the future of the Web:

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Related book: The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business