Eric Schmidt Titan of Tech & Intelligence

How a visionary billionaire behind Google now envisions the future under artificial intelligence...

- By Keith Gordon

During the information age of the last three decades, many innovators and entrepreneurs have contributed to the creation, adoption and now near-universal usage of computers and technology in our day-to-day lives. Icons such as Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Steve Jobs (Apple) certainly belong in that category, alongside the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Whilst each of these names, and associated companies, have played their role in the current technological state of the world, it can be argued that Google has had the most wideranging global impact with the diverse slate of services, products and industries it has come to dominate. Whereas Amazon still largely sells goods (despite a recent move into cloud services), and Microsoft largely sells software, Google is in the business of information, in the information age. And while Page and Brin are the founders of the global behemoth that Google has become, it would be wrong to ignore the outsised impact that Eric Schmidt had on the company, and therefore the world, once he became Chairman and CEO in 2001 - and continues to have in the age of artificial intelligence.

Schmidt, now a billionaire many times over, was raised in Blacksburg, Virginia, where his father was an economics professor at Virginia Tech. He himself chose Princeton University for college and began as an architecture student before, seemingly prophetically, switching his studies to electrical engineering, earning his degree there in 1976. He followed this by earning both his master's and doctorate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.