Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, has been talking about the future, and coming up with some very – shall we say interesting – comments.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, he envisaged a future where the youth of tomorrow should, in their later life, be automatically entitled to change their name and identity to escape the perhaps dubious activities of their past, which have all been recorded on Facebook or other social networking mediums.

Indeed, it’s a well known fact that employers now ferret around in social networking sites to research prospective job candidates as a far more honest “reference” than the normal sort. A brutally honest reference, in many cases.

Perhaps even more ominous sounding for our online future, was where Schmidt saw Internet searches going next.

He told the Wall Street Journal: “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is… One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”

Schmidt continues: “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Uh-huh. We do? Of course, that doesn’t mean Google will be telling us which way to vote in future elections (for the “Search Party”, obviously…). Does it? No, of course not. He means if we’re walking past a record store, which Google can tell from our location via our mobile, and we like a certain band which Google knows has a new song out, it can prompt us to go in and buy the track.

Slightly scary, isn’t it? To say the least.

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