Sebastian Thrun: Flying Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, and Education

About this episode

<p>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.</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.</span>&#160;If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to <a href="https://lexfridman.com/ai">https://lexfridman.com/ai</a> or connect with @lexfridman on <a href="https://twitter.com/lexfridman">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/">LinkedIn</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@lexfridman">Medium</a>, or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman">YouTube</a> where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584">Apple Podcasts</a> or support it on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman">Patreon</a>.</p> <p>This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cash-app/id711923939">App Store</a>, <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareup.cash&#38;hl=en_US">Google Play</a>), use code &#8220;LexPodcast&#8221;.&#160;</p> <p>Here&#8217;s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.</p> <p>00:00 &#8211; Introduction<br /> 03:24 &#8211; The Matrix<br /> 04:39 &#8211; Predicting the future 30+ years ago<br /> 06:14 &#8211; Machine learning and expert systems<br /> 09:18 &#8211; How to pick what ideas to work on<br /> 11:27 &#8211; DARPA Grand Challenges<br /> 17:33 &#8211; What does it take to be a good leader?<br /> 23:44 &#8211; Autonomous vehicles<br /> 38:42 &#8211; Waymo and Tesla Autopilot<br /> 42:11 &#8211; Self-Driving Car Nanodegree<br /> 47:29 &#8211; Machine learning<br /> 51:10 &#8211; AI in medical applications<br /> 54:06 &#8211; AI-related job loss and education<br /> 57:51 &#8211; Teaching soft skills<br /> 1:00:13 &#8211; Kitty Hawk and flying cars<br /> 1:08:22 &#8211; Love and AI<br /> 1:13:12 &#8211; Life</p>