Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered a look at how Google approaches its users and how he sees technology shaping our behavior in the years to come at the Washington Ideas Forum, an event held late last week.
Google's policy, he explained, is to get as close as possible to the "creepy" line without going past it.
"There is what I call the creepy line," he said, according to The Hill. "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
Schmidt was asked by The Atlantic's James Bennet about the possibility of Google developing a kind of "implant" in the future.
"I would argue that implanting something in your brain is beyond the creepy line," he replied, according to The Hill's transcript, "at least for the moment, until the technology gets better."
He remarked that Google's culture is such that he would know if such a technology were in development, but that, "As far as I know, we do not have a medical lab working on implants." He added, "As far as I know. I will check after this."
As for how Google will serve its users, he noted, "With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches...We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less now what you're thinking about."
Bennet also asked Schimdt about his concept of "augmented humanity," which Schmidt described at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference, and asked the CEO about how people will interact with computers in the future.
"Ultimately, if you take this forward some decades, it's obvious that the computers will be our assistants, that they will wander around with us, if you will, they'll know where we are, they'll care what we're doing," Schmidt said. "They'll be able to track all these kinds of things...This means, for example, you don't need to remember as much as you used to."
Learn more about Schmidt's vision of the future.