Sebastian Thrun Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Inventor Of Google Glass Says It Could Outsource Our Brains

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.