Sebastian Thrun: Flying Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, and Education

Sebastian Thrun is one of the greatest roboticists, computer
scientists, and educators of our time. He led development of the
autonomous vehicles at Stanford that won the 2005 DARPA Grand
Challenge and placed second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. He
then led the Google self-driving car program which launched the
self-driving revolution. He taught the popular Stanford course on
Artificial Intelligence in 2011 which was one of the first MOOCs.
That experience led him to co-found Udacity, an online education
platform. He is also the CEO of Kitty Hawk, a company working on
building flying cars or more technically eVTOLS which stands for
electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft.


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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you
should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.


00:00 – Introduction
03:24 – The Matrix
04:39 – Predicting the future 30+ years ago
06:14 – Machine learning and expert systems
09:18 – How to pick what ideas to work on
11:27 – DARPA Grand Challenges
17:33 – What does it take to be a good leader?
23:44 – Autonomous vehicles
38:42 – Waymo and Tesla Autopilot
42:11 – Self-Driving Car Nanodegree
47:29 – Machine learning
51:10 – AI in medical applications
54:06 – AI-related job loss and education
57:51 – Teaching soft skills
1:00:13 – Kitty Hawk and flying cars
1:08:22 – Love and AI
1:13:12 – Life