Sebastian Thrun

“This is the age of disruption.”

“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.”

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

“At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment.”

“Education should learn from the positive side of gaming - reward, accomplishment, and fun.”

“The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.”

“As a child, I spent a lot of time with things like Lego, building trains, cars, complex structures, and I really liked that.”

“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.”

“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.”