28 Quotes & Sayings By Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun is an Academy Award®-winning computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is currently Google Fellow and Director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL). He was acquired by Google in 2004 and led the development of Google's self-driving car project, which became Google's first autonomous vehicle and is now known as Waymo. In 2015, Thrun founded Otto, a self-driving trucking company acquired by Uber in 2016.

1
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
Machine learning is the science of getting computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. Sebastian Thrun
6
Mercedes does beautiful work, absolutely. Sebastian Thrun
7
To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They're all creative expressions. Sebastian Thrun
8
You could get an entire computer science education for free right now. Sebastian Thrun
9
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
10
I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence. Sebastian Thrun
11
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
12
As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence. Sebastian Thrun
13
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
14
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
15
The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment. Sebastian Thrun
16
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
17
Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity. Sebastian Thrun
18
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
19
Education should learn from the positive side of gaming - reward, accomplishment, and fun. Sebastian Thrun
20
It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind. Sebastian Thrun
21
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
22
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
23
At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment. Sebastian Thrun
24
I care about education for everyone, not just the elite. Sebastian Thrun
25
When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident. Sebastian Thrun
26
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
27
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