Quotes from Sebastian Thrun

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

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.

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

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?

Millions of Americans are denied the privilege of driving on health grounds.

Because of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society.

This is the age of disruption.

Almost all accidents take place because of human distraction.

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

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.

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.

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

The 99 percent should be protesting college campuses.

The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mercedes does beautiful work, absolutely.