This is Google's vision of the future

Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the world his vision of the Google-ified future at the company's Zeitgeist sales conference. Turns out it involves a lot of creepy products we already know about and others we aren't ready to welcome into our lives. Here's a day in the life, from The New York Times's Claire Cain Miller, paraphrasing Schimdt: 

His bed will wake him up when he cycles out of R.E.M. sleep. A driverless car will take him to work. Returning phone calls, scheduling events and other routine tasks will be taken care of by devices using artificial intelligence. A micro-robot he swallows will monitor his insides and alert his doctor if something is wrong. At night, a robot will go to parties in his place.

Some of those things might sound familiar, as they can be done by Google's most recent future-now innovations: Google Glass, Google's driverless cars, and Google Now, the company's personal assistant. Glass and Now can schedule events and return phone calls using artificial intelligence, while the driverless car does the driving. Some of the stuff, like your robot replacement, to our delight, does not yet exist—parties are things we hope we want to do in human form forever. (If you had a robot double, would you really stay at work while it went out partying?) While it's all very ambitious, it also sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Which, is "cool" to read about, but not a society I'd want to live in. Don't all those people use technology to numb their brains from the "dust," or whatever metaphor for destruction and despair you prefer? Is that what we're gunning for?

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.