Sebastian Thrun

We humans usually feel that we are the best at everything we do, that we can safely drive ourselves. But tens of thousands of people die every year. We need to be open to having technology assist us, to find ways in which technology makes us safer.

I feel every technology can be abused, but fundamentally we put new technologies into the service of humanity.

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.

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.

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.

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