On the future of technology:

In the future, you will be able to send a robot to a rock concert instead of you.

By 2020, fiber networks will be implemented in every city.

Smart cars will reduce traffic accidents, which are 99% due to human error.

The web will be like electricity: always there.

Handsets could be preloaded with medical diagnostic tools.

“In the next five to ten years, another 5 billion people will join the Internet,” said Schmidt, the company’s chief executive and one of the world’s richest men.

Most of those people will be in places like Asia, Africa and South America. And while newfound access to information will level the playing field to a degree, it will also set the table for the world’s villains as much as the up-and-comers, noted Cohen, Google’s director of ideas, who spent nearly half a decade at the State Department. This coming influx means we’ll keep seeing repressive governments censoring and stifling information and Internet access. And terrorists and hacker groups will continue to battle law enforcement in a fight that seems never ending.

“In the next five to ten years, another 5 billion people will join the Internet,” said Schmidt, the company’s chief executive and one of the world’s richest men.

Most of those people will be in places like Asia, Africa and South America. And while newfound access to information will level the playing field to a degree, it will also set the table for the world’s villains as much as the up-and-comers, noted Cohen, Google’s director of ideas, who spent nearly half a decade at the State Department. This coming influx means we’ll keep seeing repressive governments censoring and stifling information and Internet access. And terrorists and hacker groups will continue to battle law enforcement in a fight that seems never ending.

Look at Google’s self-drive car. In 2005, the winner of the DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition for American driverless vehicles, drove 7 miles in 7 hours. Yet only six years later, Google has designed an autonomous car that has driven hundreds of thousands of miles in ordinary traffic. So what changed?

Autocratic regimes don’t stay in power for decades by governing randomly; rather, they do so by following a tried-and-tested playbook of strategic censorship, isolation and repression of dissent. And control over information flows and the public sphere is a key element of this model of autocratic regime

In a report released this morning, the International Labour Organization estimates that worldwide youth unemployment will continue to grow over the next five years, reaching 12.8% in 2013. That means youth who are already without jobs are more likely to stay that way for longer, denying them crucial work skills and hobbling their careers for the rest of their lives.

Let’s face it, the existing way of finding a job and making connections is just not working anymore. There’s an adage that says “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” LinkedIn is proof of that. Simply finding an appealing job and submitting a resume isn’t enough — now companies are looking for personalized approaches and recommendations from networks.

Google chief Eric Schmidt sounds equally as open to those kind of changes himself. “I think you’re describing a world of tracking which I think is highly unlikely to occur, because people will be upset about it in the same way you are,” Schmidt said in response to a question about the scary future of data-tracking that Google will help create. He continues:

Governments won’t allow it, and it’ll be bad business. And ultimately, in a competitive market, companies want the consumers to be happy. So it’s true tracking in this context…you’re taking a much broader view of the word [‘tracking’] than any I would use. A situation where you go to people and say, ‘Oh, here’s our phone, and we’re going to track you to death,’ people are not going to buy that phone. It’s just a bad business model.

In the industrial era, labor unrest came when the workers felt that the owners were profitting wrongfully from them. I wonder if in the connected age, we are going to see labor unrest when folks are unceremoniously dropped from the on-demand labor pool.

What are the labor laws in a world where workforce is on demand? And an even bigger question is how are we as a society going to create rules, when data, feedback and, most importantly, reputation are part an always-shifting equation?

I’ve been following the work of Gerd Leonhard for a few years. His presentation at MIDEM 2012 was particularly eye-opening, especially where he talks about the impact of mobile devices on music. If you’ve not been following him, here’s an opportunity to get up to speed. When major record labels are lobbying Government for new laws on your internet use, it’s time to pay attention.

Tim O’Reilly is a guy that you should really pay attention to. He’s been a leading commentator around key technology areas such as publishing, Web 2.0, open data and the burgeoning Maker movement for a number of years. The organisation he founded, O’Reilly Media, lives by the mantra of ‘changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators’ and he’s viewed as something of a master at both identifying trends and amplifying them.