Speaking at Penn's commencement at Franklin Field in Philadelphia on Monday, Schmidt advised, "you need to turn off your computer, turn off your phone, look at people who are near and around you and decide that humans are the most important things, not the other aspects," according to the Philadelphia Daily News.

"You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be in the right place and be ready," Schmidt also told graduates, according to the newspaper.

Schmidt also noted the differences between graduates today and those of his college days in the 1970s. "We had Tang. You had Red Bull. We had VCRs that held an hour of programming and cost $700. You have iPods that can upload 15 hours of videoin a minute. We didn't tell everyone about our most embarrassing moment; you record them and post them to Facebook and YouTube every day. I'm so happy my record for misachievements isn't around for posterity. I'm looking forward to yours to be there for many years."

Schmidt later talked about the importance of investigative reporting and newspapers, which are struggling as an industry in part due to Google's model to make information more readily available anytime.

"We need to do whatever it takes to make sure investigative reporting continues to flourish," Schmidt said, according to the newspaper. "Today, newspapers allow us to search and index their information. It's easy for their computers to block us with a robot file, but they've made the decision that it's OK for us to point to their content, because we send traffic to their sites. In a sense, we're in this together.

"As to the 'Where's the money?' question, that's much harder. We have not yet, in my view, developed a good substitute for the totality of revenue that newspapers have. But Google will certainly not become a paid service," Schmidt added.