Sebastian Thrun Quotations

Honestly, the average American spends about 52 minutes a day in commute traffic. And as much as I love driving my car and many people like driving their car, commuting has never been fun for me.

Technology is synonymous for connection with other people.

I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.

Most rules that you think are written in stone are just societal. You can change the game and really reach for the stars and make the world a better place.

I have a strong disrespect for authority and for rules. Including gravity. Gravity sucks.

If we study learning as a data science, we can reverse engineer the human brain and tailor learning techniques to maximize the chances of student success. This is the biggest revolution that could happen in education, turning it into a data-driven science, and not such a medieval set of rumors professors tend to carry on.

I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.

I have a really deep belief that we create technologies to empower ourselves. We've invented a lot of technology that just makes us all faster and better, and I'm generally a big fan of this. I just want to make sure that this technology stays subservient to people. People are the number one entity there is on this planet.

It's important to celebrate your failures as much as your successes. If you celebrate your failures really well, and if you get to the motto and say, 'Wow, I failed, I tried, I was wrong, I learned something,' then you realize you have no fear, and when your fear goes away, you can move the world.

You can't change the world without a certain amount of healthy willingness to break the rules.

The Jetsons had them in the 1960s. They were the defining element of 'Knight Rider' in the 1980s: cars that drive themselves. Self-driving cars appear in countless science fiction movies. By Hollywood standards, they are so normal we don't even notice them. But in real life, they still don't exist. What if you could buy one today?

We need to make education so much fun that students can't help but learn.

At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment,

It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.

Every time I act on a fear, I feel disappointed in myself. I have a lot of fear. If I can quit all fear in my life and all guilt, then I tend to be much, much more living up to my standards. I've never seen a person fail if they didn't fear failure.

You are going to fail, and failing, for me, is as joyful as succeeding. Failing means that there is something to learn, and we can improve and do it better next time.

Giving education away for free is a really good idea, but it can't be the future of education. There has to be a business model around it that actually works.

If we could do away with traffic accidents, that'd be wonderful. There'd be more than a million people saved every year on this planet.

Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.

Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.

Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.

If you look at the ability of a self-driving car to stay in the lane and not to speed and keep a good distance to the car in front of you, it actually does better than me.

In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.

Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It's really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.

We humans usually feel that we are the best at everything we do, that we can safely drive ourselves. But tens of thousands of people die every year. We need to be open to having technology assist us, to find ways in which technology makes us safer.

I learned to basically pull my own weight, just do my own thing. I spent a lot of time alone and I loved it. It was actually really great because to the present day I love spending time alone. I go bicycling alone, go climbing alone and I just love being with myself and observing myself and learning something.

The potential here is enormous. Autonomous vehicles will be as important as the Internet.

Last year's teams failed almost exclusively because of software problems,

None of us think about a world where all the cars are automated all the time. It could take society 20 years to adopt the technology.

I find it amazingly easy to take something, if you really believe in it, and turn it to reality.

I feel every technology can be abused, but fundamentally we put new technologies into the service of humanity.

I don't think we will put higher-ed out of business. I think we'll evolve it. More access, higher quality, lower costs, more global reach.

If it was only for the military, I wouldn't be here today.

I always love to be careful with my expectations so that life has pleasant surprises for me.

I always felt that if countries knew each other better, there would be less war. Often, conflict goes with demonizing other countries and cultures.

I take all day to climb mountains and then spend about 10 minutes at the top admiring the view.

It is only a matter of time until consumers have self-driving cars.

That was a turning point in the race.

The problem with cars now is that they spend the vast majority of their time parked in the wrong location so they cannot be used by other drivers,

We had a good day, ... It has been quite rewarding to partner with Volkswagen on an event that contributes to such significant advancements in vehicle technology.

We don't look at problems logically, we look at them emotionally. We look at them through the guts. We look at them as if we're doing a high school problem, like what is beautiful, what makes me recognized among my peers. We don't go and think about things. We, as a society, don't wish to engage in rational thought.

Extrapolate two, three or four years out, and then let your imagination play.

You have to understand that teaching online is different, just like movies are different from the stage and TV is different from radio.

We have done the impossible. People said: 'Give up it's not possible', but we did it.

Even as a college professor at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I went out, took risks, and tried to invent new things, such as participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge and working on self-driving cars.

I used to tell my graduate students at Stanford, 'Don't worry about what job you have to pick because your job picks you. Let your job pick you. Find something you are passionate about. Then when you are passionate, be persistent. Just keep doing it for a while because progress is always hard work. It never rests in ideas.'

This is for people who say, 'Cars can't drive themselves,' ... These are the same people who said the Wright brothers wouldn't fly.

This car, to me, is really a piece of history.

It might fundamentally alter the way we use our highways and save trillions of dollars.

It's a no-brainer that 50 to 60 years from now, cars will drive themselves,

It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

The next big milestone we are heading for now is proving self-driving is possible in traffic. Our goal at Stanford is to be able, within the next two years, to drive from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles with 100 percent autonomy--without any human intervention whatsoever.

Education used to be a slice of life, something you did as a child through college, and then spent the rest of your life working, and then death. Everything is about to change. I believe education will become something that fits seamlessly into life, and we will take big clunky things like degrees and college and fit them into a weekend.

Everyone has to place a bet down on speed.

It won't be a very fast drive going from San Francisco to Los Angeles ? it might just drive 55 mph, it won't go 90 like everybody else does in California.

It went exactly as I had predicted. I knew exactly how it would react.

As a child, I spent a lot of time with things like Lego, building trains, cars, complex structures, and I really liked that.

Any vision that we have for self-driving cars must address driving in traffic.

The military are interested in more potent weapons, and by itself that's a bad answer.

In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.

If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?

I honestly believe that the impact of this and other things related to self-driving cars could turn out to be more fundamental to mankind than the invention of the internet,

In the past, someone would look at a problem, write some code, test it, improve it by hand, test it again and so on. The problem is, software is becoming larger and larger and less and less manageable. So there's a trend to make software that can adapt itself. This is a really big item for the future.

I really believe that we have to work hard to make online education better and better, and eventually it's going to be really great. But like most of these things, it takes time to improve, to understand and to make things really good.

I care about education for everyone, not just the elite.

I'd really love to see a business model for higher education going forward that is actually affordable, that uses modern technology to reach scale and quality and that really reimburses the services rendered in a way that's meaningful to everybody.

I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.

I am a big fan of putting the intelligence in the cars.

I believe e-courses will eventually change people's attitude toward learning. Education will play an increasingly dominant role in people's lives. For people of all ages and all geographies.

Google X is here to do moonshot-type projects. Not just shooting to the moon, but bringing the moon back to Earth.

Question every assumption and go towards the problem, like the way they flew to the moon. We should have more moon shots and flights to the moon in areas of societal importance.

That's what Google taught me. Aim higher. Udacity is my playground - to radically experiment and find out. I've seen the light.

The Inventor Of Google Glass Says It Could Outsource Our Brains

I've developed my passion for cars that drive themselves from being stuck in traffic for many, many, many hours of my life. I don't know what it adds up to, but I feel like I've lost a year or two just in traffic. That's big to me. That's a lot of time, a lot of money that I just lose on the road.

Self-driving cars will enable car-sharing even in spread-out suburbs. A car will come to you just when you need it. And when you are done with it, the car will just drive away, so you won't even have to look for parking.

My process is learn, decide, and do. I've never seen a problem that couldn't be solved this way.

In 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.

Its a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

People mainly fail because they fear failure.

I have been spending the better part of my professional life trying to create self-driving cars. At Google, I am working with a world-class team of engineers to turn science fiction into reality.

The truth is, we were lucky to win, and Red could have easily won.

The dream of cars driving themselves is becoming a reality. Before, the question was whether it was possible. Now we know it is.