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Sebastian Thrun [1967-0] German
Rank: 101
Scientist, CEO of Udacity


Sebastian Thrun is an innovator, entrepreneur educator, and computer scientist from Germany. He was CEO and cofounder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, and a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. At Google, he founded Google X. He is currently also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.

Intelligence, Car, Education, Learning, Science, Technology, Attitude, Change, Communication, Computers, Failure, Fear, Movies, Sad, Success



QuoteTagsRank
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? Movies, Science
101
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. Education, Learning, Science, Success
102
I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence. Intelligence
103
It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind. Sad
104
Technology is synonymous for connection with other people. Technology
105
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. Change
106
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. Car
107
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. Technology
108
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.
109
I have a strong disrespect for authority and for rules. Including gravity. Gravity sucks.
110
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. Fear
111
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.
112
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.
113
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. Failure
114
I always love to be careful with my expectations so that life has pleasant surprises for me.
115
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.
116
We need to make education so much fun that students can't help but learn. Education
117
You can't change the world without a certain amount of healthy willingness to break the rules.
118
Mercedes does beautiful work, absolutely.
119
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.
120
At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment.
121
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.'
122
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.
123
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.
124
Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.
125
Almost all accidents take place because of human distraction.
126
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.
201
You have to understand that teaching online is different, just like movies are different from the stage and TV is different from radio.
202
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. Car
203
Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.
204
The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment. Learning
205
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. Intelligence
206
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.
207
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.
208
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.
209
I take all day to climb mountains and then spend about 10 minutes at the top admiring the view.
210
That's what Google taught me. Aim higher. Udacity is my playground - to radically experiment and find out. I've seen the light.
211
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.
212
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.
213
As a child, I spent a lot of time with things like Lego, building trains, cars, complex structures, and I really liked that.
214
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.
215
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.
216
It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.
217
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?
218
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.
219
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.
220
Google X is here to do moonshot-type projects. Not just shooting to the moon, but bringing the moon back to Earth.
221
I always felt that if countries knew each other better, there would be less war. Often, conflict goes with demonizing other countries and cultures.
222
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.
223
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.
224
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.
225
I find it amazingly easy to take something, if you really believe in it, and turn it to reality.
226
I care about education for everyone, not just the elite.
301
I feel every technology can be abused, but fundamentally we put new technologies into the service of humanity.
302
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. Attitude
303
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.
304
I'd aspired to give people a profound education - to teach them something substantial. But the data was at odds with this idea.
305
I feel like everyone has this competitive instinct.
306
Innovation means change.
307
You can learn for your own sake, and that's fine, but if you come to Udacity, you learn because you want someone else to understand what you learned.
308
I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position.
309
What I see is democratizing education will change everything.
310
I can give my love of learning to other people.
311
This is the age of disruption.
312
You could get an entire computer science education for free right now.
313
The idea of 'interview-less hiring' is new and a trend we will see in the changing global job market.
314
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.
315
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.
316
I literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.
317
Elite colleges like Stanford are extremely inaccessible. They're failing in their mission to provide access.
318
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. Communication
319
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.
320
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.
321
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!
322
In the field of higher ed, many have asked whether (or when) digital education will replace on-campus education. I wonder the opposite. Cinema never replaced theatre. TV didn't replace radio. I wonder how different digital education will be from classrooms, and where it will lead us.
323
With any new medium, the full power is only unearthed with experimentation.
324
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.
325
I was a popular professor. My teaching ratings were usually good. I could take complicated subjects and explain them in an entertaining way.
326
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.
401
I love to throw myself into situations where I don't understand everything yet.
402
We're now at this place where we can make the evolution of academic content match the evolution of the world.
403
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.
404
I am a really impatient person who wants to see many issues fixed with solutions that don't yet exist.
405
We should have lifelong monitoring of our vital signs that predict things like skin or pancreatic cancer so we can eradicate it. We should have personalized medicine; there's a huge amount of innovation possible.
406
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.
407
Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.
408
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.
409
There is enormous value in face to face interaction.
410
Outside the U.S., most data plans have a data limit.
411
Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt? Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.
412
Safety has been paramount for the Google self-driving car team from the very beginning.
413
My take is that A.I. is taking over. A few humans might still be 'in charge,' but less and less so.
414
As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence. Intelligence
415
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. Intelligence
416
When you raise a child, you don't sit down and take all the rules of life, write them into a big catalog, and start reading the child all these individual rules from A to Z. When we raise a child, a lot of what we do is let the child experiment and guide the experimentation. The child basically has to process his own data and learn from experience.
417
Most cars are parked at any point in time; my estimate is that I use my car about three percent of the time.
418
Flipkart is one of the most innovative companies in the way it approaches the market.
419
The last thing I want my robot to be is sarcastic. I want them to be pragmatic and reliable - just like my dishwasher.
420
To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They're all creative expressions.
421
There's almost no problem that can't be solved. That's important as a premise. History has proven it over and over again.
422
Because of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society.
423
We could live in a much better society if there was less personal car ownership.
424
There are already robotic journalists. Sure, they aren't very good, but they're getting better faster than human journalists are.
425
It's my dream to make learning as addictive as a video game.
426
Education should learn from the positive side of gaming - reward, accomplishment, and fun.
501
The teachers I know are extremely dedicated people.
502
There will be no more one-size-fits-all. Education will respond to you.
503
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.
504
The 99 percent should be protesting college campuses.
505
Less than one percent of U.S. college students attend Ivy League schools, and these students don't necessarily reflect the world's brightest and most capable thought leaders but, rather, the people who've been afforded the most opportunities to succeed.
506
The bar to get entry into the labour force is rising faster than people expected, and the ability to stay there is falling.
507
We don't live in a world where any job lasts forever.
508
We're making progress, but getting machines to replicate our ability to perceive and manipulate the world remains incredibly hard.
509
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. Intelligence
510
No state in the U.S. expressly forbids autonomous driving.
511
Millions of Americans are denied the privilege of driving on health grounds.
512
With the right care at the right time, a huge number of people could stay independent much longer, with a higher quality of life.
513
Machine learning is the science of getting computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. Computers
514
Perhaps we can get to the point where we can outsource our own personal experiences entirely into a computer - and possibly our own personality.
515
Almost everything interesting hasn't been invented yet.
516
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.
517
I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.
518
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.
519
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.
520
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.
521
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.
522
At Udacity, we always strive to make things better and learn from our mistakes.
523
There are few moments in my life where I really remember what I was doing.
524
I envision a future without traffic accidents or congestion. A future where everyone can use a car.
525
When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident.
526
Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people?
601

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