The Future, According to Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

Now into their second tour to promote their book The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses and Our Lives, I asked Schmidt and Cohen how big events of the last year, from unrest in Ukraine to Edward Snowden, have impacted or changed their initial conclusions. They told me we are entering a period of uncertainty, where the Internet is being used on both sides in conflicts from Syria to Myanmar. When I rasied a question on the state of Google's relationship with the NSA, Cohen replied, "What relationship?" Schmidt continued, "They didn't knock. They didn't call. They didn't send a letter. They just visited." The crowd chuckled.

In their book, Schmidt and Cohen paint a future world in which we commute in self-driving cars and hologram into meetings. A world in which our phones will sense when we're ill simply by analyzing our fingertips, then call the doctor for us. A world in which our beds will know when to wake us up and our walls will tell us what we should wear that day. A world changed deeply by robots.

Google recently snapped up eight different robotics companies. Schmidt said the company is "experimenting with what automation can lead to" and that robots will eventually become "omnipresent in our lives." We also talked about the future of Nest, Google Glass and self-driving cars. Schmidt said it's more likely we'll be driving smarter cars, long before cars will be driving themselves. "It's very important that these cars not have a lot of bugs in them. We're very close, but that last little bit is hard."

Schmidt and Cohen write that 5 billion more people will come online in the next decade. Both Google and Facebook want to help connect the world, but they're taking two vastly different approaches. Facebook is reportedly in talks to buy a drone company that could help deliver internet access to remote areas of the planet via aerial drones. Google, meantime, is laying fiber in US cities and deploying broadband balloons over different countries. "It's in the research stage," said Schmidt, but Google has already deployed high-altitude balloons to the stratosphere that provide data services, "and we've actually demonstrated this working." On Google Fiber, Cohen added "It turns out it's a very good business… we benefit when people have very high-speed connections…It's in our interests as a company and your interest as a consumer."

Many people have compared the state of innovation at Google to Apple recently. While we see Google making big bets, Apple historically doesn't make large acqusitions and hasn't come out with a category defining product since the iPad in 2010. Still, Schmidt said, "Apple's a very run-- well-run company and I'm sure whatever issues they're facing, they'll solve. They're very, very smart. I was on the board for a long time."

And despite all the change that's sure to come to the tech industry, Schmidt told me he thinks the companies he's named as the "four horsemen" of today -- Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon -- will be the four horsemen of tomorrow. I later asked Steve Case the same thing at SXSW and he said, with all due respect to Schmidt, he is "most certainly wrong."