Quotes from Sebastian Thrun

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

Google X is here to do moonshot-type projects. Not just shooting to the moon, but bringing the moon back to Earth.

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

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.

My take is that A.I. is taking over. A few humans might still be 'in charge,' but less and less so.

And math to me is just a training course to be a citizen, how to think in the world.

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

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.

We're making progress, but getting machines to replicate our ability to perceive and manipulate the world remains incredibly hard.

Innovation means change.

Flipkart is one of the most innovative companies in the way it approaches the market.

I feel like everyone has this competitive instinct.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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