Sebastian Thrun Quotes

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

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

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

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.

~ Sebastian Thrun

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

~ Sebastian Thrun

Mercedes does beautiful work, absolutely.

~ Sebastian Thrun

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

~ Sebastian Thrun

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

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

~ 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

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

~ Sebastian Thrun

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.

~ Sebastian Thrun

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.

~ Sebastian Thrun

The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

~ Sebastian Thrun

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

~ Sebastian Thrun

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.

~ 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

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

~ Sebastian Thrun

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

~ Sebastian Thrun

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

~ 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

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.

~ Sebastian Thrun