Sebastian Thrun

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.

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 can give my love of learning to other people.

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.

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.

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.

It's my dream to make learning as addictive as a video game.

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.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

You don't lose weight by watching someone else exercise. You don't learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.

The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.

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