Sebastian Thrun

I wanted to participate in the political responsibilities of an American citizen. I wanted to vote. I wanted to be a full member of the American community. I made America my home country. It's my identity in many ways.

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

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.

You can't change the world without a certain amount of healthy willingness to break the rules.

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.

If we study learning as a data science, we can reverse engineer the human brain and tailor learning techniques to maximize the chances of student success. This is the biggest revolution that could happen in education, turning it into a data-driven science, and not such a medieval set of rumors professors tend to carry on.

You have to understand that teaching online is different, just like movies are different from the stage and TV is different from radio.

What I see is democratizing education will change everything.

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.

Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.

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.

Giving education away for free is a really good idea, but it can't be the future of education. There has to be a business model around it that actually works.