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. This conversation
is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would
like to get more information about this podcast go to
https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter,
LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the
video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast,
please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or support it on Patreon.
This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store,
Google Play), use code "LexPodcast".  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