Sebastian Thrun Quotes & Sayings

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

People mainly fail because they fear failure. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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.' — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

The Inventor Of Google Glass Says It Could Outsource Our Brains — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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? — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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

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? — Sebastian Thrun

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

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

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

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

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

Technology is synonymous for connection with other people. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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. — Sebastian Thrun

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