Eric Schmidt is a superstar, on par with Rafael Nadal, Michael Jordon, George Clooney, or Stephen Hawking. However, you may have never heard of him. The billionaire former Apple board member and programmer is completing his 10-year tour of duty as CEO of Google, and has been one of the most influential forces of the internet age. Bringing that influence to bear, he has some choice words on the importance and future of one of the most important developments in human history: Collective Intelligence.

Collective Intelligence (not to be confused with the Universal Unconscious), is the inconceivably vast amount of freely shared and interconnected information and public content that is created by people on the internet every day. There are entire companies designed to simply record, analyze, and make sense of this information, and whole branches of research and development devoted to figuring out how to do it better. In fact, the FBI recently put out feelers in the IT industry to create an app that will help mine data from social networking sites for law enforcement purposes.