Sebastian Thrun founded Google X, the search and technology giant’s ‘moonshots’ unit but left in 2011 to start Udacity (not to be confused with Udemy), the not-for-profit online platform that seeks to make high level tech-centric education freely available through online courses. He is also co-founder of Kitty Hawk, the ‘flying cars’ start-up being funded by Google co-founder Larry Pate.
One of the, pardon the pun, driving-forces in the early days of autonomous vehicle technology, Thrun is well and widely regarded as a true Silicon Valley visionary. He is convinced that over the next few decades the latest technology in the world will prove an antidote to the existential gloom that can be easy to experience when considering the current problems of the world.
Thrun is also convinced that the two start-ups he currently leads, Udacity and Kitty Hawk, represent the kinds of technology that will prove central to a brighter future for not only humanity but our wider environment.
In that vein, he has also expressed optimism around the long-term impact of the current coronavirus crisis, despite having personally lost two friends to the virus. For anyone struggling to see why Thrun places such faith in the power of technology, he suggests a thought experiment – travel back in time to 1870 and attempt to convince those living 150 years ago that in 2020 flying between continents at almost the speed of sound would be normal. And that the average lifespan will be almost double with surgeons able to cut us open to repair our inner workings without us feeling any pain.
As he simply says:
“This is magic for the people who lived back then – why can’t there be magic today? Despite the Covid-19 situation, I allow myself to live with optimism because every storm passes. Moments of crisis are accelerators.”
How Did German-born Thrun Become The Seer Of Silicon Valley?
Thrun originally hails from Solingen in Germany and studied for a PhD in computer science from the University of Bonn before moving on to the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and then Stanford in 2003. It was the year before Stanford alumni Sergey Brin and Larry Page floated Google as a public company.
Shortly after arriving at Stanford, Thrun led a team that won a Pentagon-funded $2 million contest to invest a self-driving car able to complete a 130-mile course in the Mojave desert, solidifying a reputation as a remarkably talented engineer. In 2007 he joined Google as a fellow and within a few years had founded Google X.
Among projects that ranged from glucose-sensitive contact lenses to the origins of Street View and internet hot air balloons, Thrun launched the Google Self-Driving Car Project. That project became Waymo, which is leading the international race towards mass market autonomous vehicles. He is still a huge advocate of self-driving cars, believing they will cut congestion through smart algorithms will prevent the build-up of traffic in certain areas, see the frequency of road accidents reduced to the occasional tragedy and cut pollution thanks to the switch to electric power.
Flying Cars – A Solution To Congestion And Pollution?
Thrun is still enthused by the prospect of self-driving cars but is no longer directly involved in their development himself. Instead, he’s gone one better and is now both an enthusiastic evangelist, and entrepreneur, in the ‘flying car’ space.
Except, he doesn’t like the term ‘flying car’, other than the fact he appreciates it’s catchy, which is important when it comes to raising public awareness, and investment into the sector. The technical term is e-VTOL (electronic vertical take-off and landing).
Thrun sees e-VTOLs as best described as clean, cheap, silent helicopter alternatives that will be affordable to a mass market.
Kitty Hawk, the e-VTOL, or flying car, start-up Thrun is CEO of, was the idea, he says, of Larry Page, who he lauds as a visionary inventor. He is convinced that the technology, despite the complex problems it will have to solve before it can be commercialised, will have a huge impact on urban living and pollution levels within the next 10-20 years. He believes e-VTOL will be well on its way to becoming a regular mode of transport 10 years from now and will be mass adopted within 20.
During a talk at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference 2019, San Francisco – Future of Flight, Thrun explains:
“If we take daily traffic from the ground and move it a few hundred feet up in the air, we could literally free the world from traffic”.
He also talks of how energy efficient e-VTOL vehicles will be. Almost all energy is used for drag, the energy used to combat the air, not lift. And because a flying car can go in a straight line, Kitty Hawk believes the energy efficiency of their mass produced vehicles will be around a third of that of a Tesla, when calculated per mile travelled.
Kitty Hawk’s prototypes, of which there are three, now include
“a vehicle that takes off and lands vertically, flies at 1,000ft and has a noise level of 38 decibels: engineer-speak for ‘you can’t hear it’. We built this, we have done thousands of sample flights. I’m not making it up.”
What will take more time to perfect than flying car technology itself, concedes Thrun, are sophisticated air-traffic control systems and regulations able to coordinate tens of thousands of flying vehicles in air-space current technology can cope with low double figures in.
When that problem is solved, we can wave a final goodbye to ground-level congestion and the pollution levels that have resulted from the combustion engine.
Can Widely Accessible Online Education Be The Great Equaliser?
Thrun’s other passion is online education. He decided it was time to leave Google after he heard a 2011 talk given by Sal Khan, a pioneer in the space and behind the Khan Academy. He had continued to lecture at Stanford and led the Ivy League university’s AI course, along with a co-instructor.
The pair convinced the dean, who was understandably initially unsure about offering a course that charged students $51,000 a year for free online, to sign off on an experiment to do exactly that. They expected “maybe 1000 students”. They got 160,000.
23,000 students, both at Stanford and online, finished the course. When they were ranked, it was found not one of the top 412 performers came from Stanford – the elite of the American university system. All 400+ of the best students came from the online diaspora.
That, says Thrun:
“Opened my eyes to the opportunity. We think of the American education system as the best in the world, but it’s not reaching everybody.”
Inspired by what could be achieved by humanity if the entire world population had affordable access to the highest quality education, as well as its potential to level the playing field across socio-economic and geographic demographics, Thrun left Google to found Udacity.
“It felt like education was the single most important thing for the world”.
Udacity offers “nano-degrees” in AI, computer vision and other technology fields that cost an average of just $1,300. His ambition for Udacity is no less than that which he has shown for driverless and air-borne vehicles technology. Last year Udacity’s number of graduates passed 100,000 but Thrun sees that as just the beginning:
“Our goal will be reached when the world’s GDP has doubled. It felt so important to bring education to everybody.”
Like any start-up, Udacity’s journey hasn’t been without problems to contend with. In 2018 the not-for-profit was forced into layoffs, restructuring and choosing a new CEO. Thrum left the role in 2016 to take up the position of chairman but costs were getting out of control and growth stalling.
However, Thrun believes the period represents little more than inevitable teething problems and that the Covid-19 pandemic will accelerate the trend towards online remote learning as a genuine alternative to traditional university degrees. Most universities are anyway now running their courses virtually and that is likely to continue until at least Christmas. Despite that enforced change, tuition fees have not been reduced and have increased in cost at three times the rate of inflation since the late 1990s.
Students application numbers for traditional four-year university courses are drastically down and it is likely many weaker institutions may not reopen. That will, Thrun thinks, speed up the process of qualifications from online-only institutions such as Udacity no longer being regarded as “second-class citizens”, compared to degrees from bricks-and-mortar higher education institutions.
That will be key, with Thrun asserting:
“The biggest thing is whether we can make [Udacity] prestigious and meaningful not just for learners but also for employers, for society. That’s our chance.”
It’s hard not to be convinced by Sebastian Thrun’s optimism and enthusiasm. And if flying cars, or his preferred term of e-VTOLs, and online education have even a fraction of the positive impact he is convinced the technologies will bring, he’ll have made a huge contribution towards the betterment of humanity.