What do a driverless car, Google, and democracy in higher education have in common?
The German computer scientist Sebastian Thrun is a creative mind working in the zone between the possible and impossible. Resisting impossible ideas are easy but inventors are unhappy, says Sebastian Thrun. Inventors are constantly searching for solutions and they feel the pain of an unsolved problem.
Sebastian Thrun’s ideas have been great success stories. Udacity‘s artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 people from all over the world. Together with Peter Norvig, he decided that having a university course where you teach 200 students was not a great idea when you could use technology and reach millions. Free university education! The on-line students received the same homework as Stanford University students and they were graded using the same scale. A great success but also a learning process for both the teachers and the students. The driverless car has driven around through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheels. The sensors in the car gather millions of data points per second. Data cars, pedestrians, birds, and a million other things.
Resisting the temptation to deem ideas as impossible is vital since all new ideas are impossible until someone tries and more importantly succeeds. This is something that it is almost so obvious that it makes little sense to say it. But we often reject new ideas as impossible. We do everything to stop people from investigating and trying to realise the goal. By constantly rejecting ideas we might just happen to reject the next Great Idea.
In this video, you can watch Sebastian Thrun talk about the pain and passion involved in innovation.
Photo: Web by Salvatore Vuono
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