Great Throughts Treasury

"A Facebook or Google engineer are world experts in a subject matter, but they don?t necessarily know how to teach online. So we are kind of the Hollywood of education. That might be an overstatement. We are like the movie production side. We put together the video editors and the playwrights and sometimes the actors. Sometimes we even give the people that are facing the camera, and the original engineer doesn?t really show their face that much on camera."

"Every time I act on a fear, I feel disappointed in myself. I have a lot of fear. If I can quit all fear in my life and all guilt, then I tend to be much, much more living up to my standards. I've never seen a person fail if they didn't fear failure."

"Any vision that we have for self-driving cars must address driving in traffic."

"Everyone has to place a bet down on speed."

"Extrapolate two, three or four years out, and then let your imagination play."

"I am a big fan of putting the intelligence in the cars."

"I have a really deep belief that we create technologies to empower ourselves. We've invented a lot of technology that just makes us all faster and better, and I'm generally a big fan of this. I just want to make sure that this technology stays subservient to people. People are the number one entity there is on this planet."

"I actually believe the residential experience, the way it is set up today, costs a lot of money to make. We?ve forgotten to look at all the people that are excluded from this experience. These are people in mid-career, these are people in geographic locations that can?t make it ? or people who just won?t be admitted to MIT and Stanford. There?s a vast market beyond the existing higher education market that is almost entirely neglected. I?m very proud to be a professor at Stanford. We do I believe very good work. And to make this happen on a campus with the quality of the research faculty, that?s just what it costs. And I take no issue with this. I just think that there?s a huge number of student left behind that we should reach as well, and Udacity really focuses on those people."

"I can't teach at Stanford again. I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill. And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your students. But I've taken the red pill. I've seen Wonderland."

"I honestly believe that the impact of this and other things related to self-driving cars could turn out to be more fundamental to mankind than the invention of the internet,"

"I could restrict myself to helping a class of 20 insanely smart Stanford students who would be fine without me. But how could that impact not be dwarfed by teaching 160,000 students?"

"I believe that 50 years from now, education will be as short and sweet as Twitter is today. It will be like an evening talk. And that will be a fantastic moment."

"I have been spending the better part of my professional life trying to create self-driving cars. At Google, I am working with a world-class team of engineers to turn science fiction into reality."

"I learned to basically pull my own weight, just do my own thing. I spent a lot of time alone and I loved it. It was actually really great because to the present day I love spending time alone. I go bicycling alone, go climbing alone and I just love being with myself and observing myself and learning something."

"I take all day to climb mountains and then spend about 10 minutes at the top admiring the view."

"I'd aspired to give people a profound education?to teach them something substantial. But the data was at odds with this idea."

"If you recently learned how to refinance your house or read up on vacation spots, you learned on demand. You can have the information at your fingertips. It's so profoundly different from education. We have to take education out of the extremely curated environment -- and bring it back to the playful model -- and let students learn at their own pace."

"In 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them."

"I wish to do away with the idea of spending one big chunk of time learning."

"If it was only for the military, I wouldn't be here today."

"I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars."

"In the past, someone would look at a problem, write some code, test it, improve it by hand, test it again and so on. The problem is, software is becoming larger and larger and less and less manageable. So there's a trend to make software that can adapt itself. This is a really big item for the future."

"In California, we have 470,000 students waitlisted to get into community colleges. They're willing and eager to pay for education. But they can't get in." Udacity aims to help support students who are not yet in college, who have to make up work to quality for college and who want to continue learning once they leave college."

"It is only a matter of time until consumers have self-driving cars."

"In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible."

"It might fundamentally alter the way we use our highways and save trillions of dollars."

"It went exactly as I had predicted. I knew exactly how it would react."

"It was this catalytic moment. I was educating more AI students than there were AI students in all the rest of the world combined."

"It won't be a very fast drive going from San Francisco to Los Angeles it might just drive 55 mph, it won't go 90 like everybody else does in California."

"It's kind of like if you had challenged people to fly across the Atlantic, and instead of one guy [making it], just Lindbergh, you had five guys flying across at the same time."

"It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves."

"It's a no-brainer that 50 to 60 years from now, cars will drive themselves."

"It's all in the algorithms."

"It's kind of like being onstage, where you have all these lights in your face and can't see the audience, but you still have to be able to excite them. So I think of the football stadium full of people that I'm facing. I get a kick out of that."

"I've developed my passion for cars that drive themselves from being stuck in traffic for many, many, many hours of my life. I don't know what it adds up to, but I feel like I've lost a year or two just in traffic. That's big to me. That's a lot of time, a lot of money that I just lose on the road."

"None of us think about a world where all the cars are automated all the time. It could take society 20 years to adopt the technology."

"Last year's teams failed almost exclusively because of software problems,"

"Nothing we had done had changed the drop-off curve."

"Self-driving cars will enable car-sharing even in spread-out suburbs. A car will come to you just when you need it. And when you are done with it, the car will just drive away, so you won't even have to look for parking."

"That was a turning point in the race."

"Question every assumption and go towards the problem, like the way they flew to the moon. We should have more moon shots and flights to the moon in areas of societal importance."

"That's what Google taught me. Aim higher. Udacity is my playground - to radically experiment and find out. I've seen the light."

"The Achilles heel [of MOOCs] is that the retention rates are low. Typically a class of 20,000 might have 500 or 1,000 finishers ? We felt that any solution that only carries 3% of kids isn't a great solution." Udacity has consequently added mentors to help shepherd students through the program and added the incentive of college credit. Those efforts have boosted retention from 3% to 100%."

"One of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" to the world online, free of charge. We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career."

"The impossible has been achieved."

"The Jetsons had them in the 1960s. They were the defining element of 'Knight Rider' in the 1980s: cars that drive themselves. Self-driving cars appear in countless science fiction movies. By Hollywood standards, they are so normal we don't even notice them. But in real life, they still don't exist. What if you could buy one today?"

"The dream of cars driving themselves is becoming a reality. Before, the question was whether it was possible. Now we know it is."

"The military are interested in more potent weapons, and by itself that's a bad answer."

"The potential here is enormous. Autonomous vehicles will be as important as the Internet."

"The next big milestone we are heading for now is proving self-driving is possible in traffic. Our goal at Stanford is to be able, within the next two years, to drive from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles with 100 percent autonomy--without any human intervention whatsoever."