Google’s Sebastian Thrun: 3 Visions in the ‘Age of Disruption’

NEW YORK — Today we drive cars, shell out enormous sums for higher education and navigate the world with electronics that demand the unwavering attention of our ears, eyes, hands and feet.

Google’s Sebastian Thrun, however, envisions a safer, more affordable and more fluid world of tomorrow. “This is the age of disruption,” Thrun told a crowd Tuesday at Wired’s annual business conference in New York City.

Aside from heading the search engine giant’s super-secretive Google X laboratory, Thrun is a Stanford University professor and a leading computer scientist. Since the early 1990s he has worked to develop artificial intelligence and robotics systems, starting with the University of Bonn’s RHINO project.

WIRED Business Conference: The Intelligence Revolution from WIRED on FORA.tv

Wired senior editor Jason Tanz sat down Tuesday to squeeze visions of the future from Thrun, who now engineers self-driving cars, reimagines university education as a digital experience and develops wireless smart glasses.

Self-Driving Cars

One of Thrun’s first loves was the self-driving car. In 2003 he found himself closely following the U.S. government’s Darpa Grand Challenge to develop a compact vehicle that could navigate itself 100 miles — without a human inside.

“I figured this would be an easy thing to do, and I went to the first [one] to watch,” Thrun said. “The cars would go a mile, crash and burn up in flames. I felt I could do better than that.”

Thrun and his team ended up winning the contest two years later with their driverless robot Stanley. “At some point it became clear that this was bigger than just racing cars in the desert,” Thrun said. “Cars kill lots of people in accidents.”

The most recent statistics suggest 35,000 people in the United States alone die each year in automobile-related accidents. Worldwide, that figure swells to 1 million souls. Thrun needed to escape the frustrating world of academic grants, so he approached Google with the ideas forged from Stanley. “The reception was very positive,” he said.

Thrun’s Google-funded research group now boasts an autonomous car that can drive thousands of miles on public roads without one hand touching the steering wheel. But to satisfy his own trust — not to mention that of the public and lawmakers — Thrun wants each system capable of driving for millions of miles.

“By far the biggest challenge is technology. We can’t yet drive a couple million miles without a person,” he said. “And that’s what makes all of the difference.”

As small as the advancement may seem to Thrun, he said legislators in Nevada, Florida, and other states have already passed bills to make self-driving systems legal.

“The social and political acceptance is actually pretty high,” Thrun said. “At some level we have world’s most amazing technology, on the other hand, we don’t have something we can sell yet.”

Digital Education

Thrun is also working to tear down walls in higher education that have persisted for more than 1,000 years: a physical classroom with a teacher, a handful of students and grades.

In spite of the successes of his “hero” Salman Khan (who started the freely available Khan Academy), Thrun felt skeptical that he could make a difference. But he invited the internet to join his course on artificial intelligence, anyway, and Thrun quickly accumulated 58,000 knowledge-hungry pupils.

“About 23,000 made it all the way through to the end. And this was a graduate-level class,” he said.

Thrun said he plans to move beyond his digital classroom experiments at Stanford University. He and his colleagues recently founded Udacity — a program that aims to become a premier and free online university. He emphasized “free” because student loan debt now exceeds both housing and credit card debt.

“The biggest problem [in higher education] is cost,” Thrun said. “Student loans … are going up 6 percent a year whereas the return on that education is going down. We’re clearly in a bubble.”

And that, he said, is where he hopes Udacity can help. “You could get an entire computer science education for free right now,” he said. “You could take your tablet with you, you learn on the bus, and take these minutes and learn how to learn for a lifetime.”

Glass-Eyed Future

Thrun’s latest effort out of Google X is called Project Glass.

The idea, he said, is to free our hands, ears and eyes from the ball-and-chain of the computers in our pockets. Glasses that can overlay digital images in a field of vision, called heads-up displays, offered an ideal solution.

Thrun said most are too bulky and “crunch down your nose,” so his team went to work to make them lightweight without diminishing their utility. That’s not to say they’re ready for the public yet — Project Glass faces a handful of development hurdles.

Public feedback has addressed many of the problems. “Distraction has been the number-one concern. Can we make this device there for when you want and need it?” Thrun said. “The reason we went public is to get feedback from everybody who might be our future customers.”

At Google X, where the management structure is purposefully horizontal, Thrun hopes to keep churning out world-changing projects.

“Google X is here to do moonshot-type projects,” Thrun said. “Not just shooting to the moon but bringing the moon back to Earth.”

Photo: Sebastian Thrun, Google, Stanford, Udacity attends Wired Business Conference in Partnership with MDC Partners at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on May 1, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Larry Busacca/WireImage for Wired)

WIRED Business Conference: The Intelligence Revolution from WIRED on FORA.tv