Anthony Levandowski

“I'm excited about bringing robots into the market, about having the most effect in the world.”

“Google was the right place to pioneer robot cars.”

“You've got to push things and get bumps and bruises along the way.”

“I like incremental improvements or at least seeing where you're going to go and really being able to understand what's feasible at the time.”

“I see Grand Challenge not as the end of the robotics adventure we're on: it's almost like the beginning.”

“I think, like all big things, you don't know they're going to be a big thing when you start. You just kind of, like, play because it's fun, and it's interesting, and then it turns out to be way more important than you expected.”

“In 2008, no one else would ever have believed me that we were going to make a car actually drive everywhere, all the time.”

“After I joined Google and stopped working on robots - I'd built some self-driving tractors on farms in the meantime - I was always tinkering and playing with robots at home and just as a hobby.”

“When you are Uber, what we care about is the customer experience of getting somebody safely, cheaply, efficiently and reliably from where they are to where they want to go.”

“If you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9 percent will say that's science fiction. Actually, it's inevitable. It's guaranteed to happen.”

“There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam... but they're always looking at something that's not measurable or you can't really see or control.”

“If you could make something one percent smarter than a human, your artificial attorney or accountant would be better than all the attorneys or accountants out there. You would be the richest person in the world. People are chasing that.”

“In 2003, my mom actually gave me a call, which is funny because she works at the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, and let me know that there's a cool competition with robots across the desert. And I thought this was definitely something I wanted to be a part of. This was the first DARPA Grand Challenge.”

“Humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules. In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there's going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge.”

“There was a pizza delivery robot from 2008, where I built a Prius to deliver pizza from downtown SF to Treasure Island.”

“Surface streets are probably a hundred to a thousand times more complicated than highways.”

“Sometimes I drive, and sometimes I'm driven.”