Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the future of technology and the future of America

Prince­ton Engi­neer­ing alum­nus and Google CEO Eric Schmidt is always in the news — but of late he seems to be even more in the news than usual. In Octo­ber, Schmidt spoke at Bloomberg Head­quar­ters about how infor­ma­tion is chang­ing the world and about the rise of the “dig­i­tal native” gen­er­a­tion. Dur­ing the talk (see the Youtube video above) Schmidt makes the fairly astound­ing pre­dic­tion that within his life­time all the world’s pop­u­la­tion will be able to access all of the world’s information.

Last week, Schmidt — who is a mem­ber of President-elect Barack Obama’s tran­si­tion eco­nomic advi­sory board — spoke with The New York Times about Google, the econ­omy, and why he thinks the gov­ern­ment should be invest­ing in clean energy tech­nol­ogy. He also denied per­sis­tent rumors that he might be appointed the nation’s first chief tech­nol­ogy officer.

Like Schmidt, Ama­zon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos — also a Prince­ton Engi­neer­ing alum — has been rumored to be on Obama’s short list for a cabinet-level CTO posi­tion. But the technoscenti con­sis­tently dis­miss the idea that either of these titans of Inter­net com­merce would be tempted to take such a posi­tion. “As CEO of Google, [Schmidt] already is tech­nol­ogy czar of the United States of Amer­ica,” quipped Jason Young, CEO of Ziff Davis Media, in a recent dis­cus­sion on crankygeeks.com.

Today’s lead story in The Daily Prince­ton­ian points out that Prince­ton Engineering’s Ed Fel­ten, direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Pol­icy, is yet a third Prince­ton­ian who has been cited as hav­ing the heavy­weight cre­den­tials nec­es­sary to serve as a national tech­nol­ogy czar. Fel­ten told Ray­mond Brusca of The Prince that such a posi­tion would be “hard to say no to on some level.” Fel­ten noted that while the job has not been defined yet by the new admin­is­tra­tion, the point of this posi­tion would be to con­nect advances in tech­nol­ogy to the things that mat­ter to people’s lives, such as health care and the economy.

On Nov. 18, the New Amer­ica Foun­da­tion is host­ing a pub­lic lec­ture by Schmidt, who will talk about the inter­sec­tion between tech­nol­ogy and the econ­omy. If you will be in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and want to attend in per­son, reg­is­ter here. Oth­er­wise, plan on watch­ing the web­cast at 1 p.m. east­ern U.S. time.

For more national tech czar spec­u­la­tion see PC World, Obamacto.org, the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, Dig­i­tal Media Wire, Reuters, Com­put­er­world, Infor­ma­tion­Week, and Busi­ness­week.