Top 75 Sebastian Thrun Quotes

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which – by and large – have advanced humanity.

It’s my dream to make learning as addictive as a video game.

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

The 99 percent should be protesting college campuses.

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.

In the field of higher ed, many have asked whether (or when) digital education will replace on-campus education. I wonder the opposite. Cinema never replaced theatre. TV didn’t replace radio. I wonder how different digital education will be from classrooms, and where it will lead us.

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.

We’re now at this place where we can make the evolution of academic content match the evolution of the world.

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!

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

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

The last thing I want my robot to be is sarcastic. I want them to be pragmatic and reliable – just like my dishwasher.

Almost everything interesting hasn’t been invented yet.

Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt? Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.

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.

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

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.

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

Almost all accidents take place because of human distraction.

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

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.

I love to throw myself into situations where I don’t understand everything yet.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are a lot of old-fashioned things we perpetuate that come from a world that’s not digital, not interactive, and not online, and we try to retain it.

There are few moments in my life where I really remember what I was doing.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Outside the U.S., most data plans have a data limit.

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

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.

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.

Many students learn best by doing. But because classrooms force the same pace on all students, they limit the degree to which students can truly learn through trial and error. Instead, lectures still force many students to follow material passively and in lockstep pace.

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.

The teachers I know are extremely dedicated people.

There’s almost no problem that can’t be solved. That’s important as a premise. History has proven it over and over again.

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.

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

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.

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.

Mercedes does beautiful work, absolutely.

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.

You could get an entire computer science education for free right now.

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

Obviously, a lot of non-profits live on donations, and that’s a wonderful thing. But higher education can’t exist on donations only because, if that were the case, we would have a hard time paying teachers adequate salaries.

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

We don’t live in a world where any job lasts forever.

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

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

I can give my love of learning to other people.

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.

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

Elite colleges like Stanford are extremely inaccessible. They’re failing in their mission to provide access.

Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.