Top 70 Sebastian Thrun Quotes

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

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

This is the age of disruption.

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

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

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

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.

Safety has been paramount for the Google self-driving car team from the very beginning.

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

What I see is democratizing education will change everything.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.

Innovation means change.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

There’s a lot to be learned about how digital media, the ability to reach anybody any time, really transforms the peer interaction experience in education at large.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Almost everything interesting hasn’t been invented yet.

There will be no more one-size-fits-all. Education will respond to you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

At Udacity, we always strive to make things better and learn from our mistakes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Technology is synonymous for connection with other people.

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?

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.

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 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.

I envision a future without traffic accidents or congestion. A future where everyone can use a car.

I feel like everyone has this competitive instinct.