Top 55 Sebastian Thrun Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Innovation means change.

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

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.

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.

Mercedes does beautiful work, absolutely.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position.

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

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

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

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

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

When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident.

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.

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

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

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

Horizontal meetings are team or project meetings, set up to coordinate individual activities. When I worked in a large tech company, those meetings just popped up in my calendar by the dozen.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

What I see is democratizing education will change everything.

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.

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 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.

The bar to get entry into the labour force is rising faster than people expected, and the ability to stay there is falling.

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

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

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.

In much of computer science, I can easily ‘auto-grade’ your work and give you an instant meaningful feedback. I can’t do this when it comes to the subtlety of human thought, language, poetry, philosophy.

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

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

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.