Sebastian Thrun

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

“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.”

“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.”

“What I see is democratizing education will change everything.”

“Most cars are parked at any point in time; my estimate is that I use my car about three percent of the time.”

“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.”

“Almost everything interesting hasn't been invented yet.”

“I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Safety has been paramount for the Google self-driving car team from the very beginning.”

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

“No state in the U.S. expressly forbids autonomous driving.”

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

“There will be no more one-size-fits-all. Education will respond to you.”

“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?”