Top 70 Sebastian Thrun Quotes

There is enormous value in face to face interaction.

With the right care at the right time, a huge number of people could stay independent much longer, with a higher quality of life.

The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.

The idea of ‘interview-less hiring‘ is new and a trend we will see in the changing global job market.

The 99 percent should be protesting college campuses.

Almost all accidents take place because of human distraction.

You can learn for your own sake, and that’s fine, but if you come to Udacity, you learn because you want someone else to understand what you learned.

There are already robotic journalists. Sure, they aren’t very good, but they’re getting better faster than human journalists are.

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.

Because of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society.

Most cars are parked at any point in time; my estimate is that I use my car about three percent of the time.

I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position.

You could claim that moving from pixelated perception, where the robot looks at sensor data, to understanding and predicting the environment is a Holy Grail of artificial intelligence.

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

I wanted to participate in the political responsibilities of an American citizen. I wanted to vote. I wanted to be a full member of the American community. I made America my home country. It’s my identity in many ways.

When you program a robot to be intelligent, you learn a number of things. You become very humble and develop enormous respect for natural intelligence because, even if you work day and night for several years, your robot isn’t that smart after all.

With any new medium, the full power is only unearthed with experimentation.

Education should learn from the positive side of gaming – reward, accomplishment, and fun.

The biggest invention of modern time is the book. The book is a digital medium; book text is written in a different form and replicable. What it really does is it allows us to replicate cultural information, scientific technology, and information out of the human brain.

I am a really impatient person who wants to see many issues fixed with solutions that don’t yet exist.

To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They’re all creative expressions.

No state in the U.S. expressly forbids autonomous driving.

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.

What I see is democratizing education will change everything.

I feel like everyone has this competitive instinct.

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

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.

Many of us are inspired and are eager to get things done. But once too many people are involved, life becomes complicated. We are all social beings, so we have an innate urge to incorporate everyone’s thoughts.

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.

Mercedes does beautiful work, absolutely.

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

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.

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.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

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

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.

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

Top notch Indian employers such as Flipkart have hired Udacity Nanodegree graduates based solely on their performance in our programme, without any in-person interview.

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.

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.

There is a simple fix to our excessive meeting culture, but it is not easy to implement. It’s one of these things that are easy to say but hard to do. The fix is: abandon all recurring meetings. I am serious. All!

People complain about the rich-and-poor divide. It’s crazy, no doubt about it. But what gets me is that today, a billionaire or head of state on their smartphone has the same direct access to information as a homeless person has on a smartphone – or a person in Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea.

We should have lifelong monitoring of our vital signs that predict things like skin or pancreatic cancer so we can eradicate it. We should have personalized medicine; there’s a huge amount of innovation possible.

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.

We’re often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

I’ve always believed that human learning is the result of relatively simple rules combined with massive amounts of hardware and massive amounts of data.

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

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

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

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

Flipkart is one of the most innovative companies in the way it approaches the market.

I have learned, if you give a team a budget, then the team tries to maximise the budget so that they get the same next year.

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’d aspired to give people a profound education – to teach them something substantial. But the data was at odds with this idea.

I was a popular professor. My teaching ratings were usually good. I could take complicated subjects and explain them in an entertaining way.

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.

We’re making progress, but getting machines to replicate our ability to perceive and manipulate the world remains incredibly hard.

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.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, is an unbelievable big thinker, and there was a saying in Google that if you wanted to know the future, go to Larry.

Perhaps we can get to the point where we can outsource our own personal experiences entirely into a computer – and possibly our own personality.

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.

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

We could live in a much better society if there was less personal car ownership.

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

You don’t lose weight by watching someone else exercise. You don’t learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to learn without being explicitly programmed.

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

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

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

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.