Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete?
How a secret project at Google led to driverless cars on American roads.
Freakonomics Radio shares a story from our friends at Search Engine. (Part one of a two-part series.)
SOURCES:
Alex Davies, author of Driven: The Race To Create the Autonomous Car.
Chris Urmson, co-founder and C.E.O. of Aurora.
Don Burnette, founder and C.E.O. of Kodiak AI.
PJ Vogt, reporter, writer, and host of the Search Engine podcast.
Sebastian Thrun, roboticist, C.E.O. of Sage AI Labs, adjunct faculty at Stanford University.
Timothy B. Lee, author of Understanding AI newsletter.
RESOURCES:
"Very few of Waymo’s most serious crashes were Waymo’s fault," by Kai Williams (Understand AI, 2025).
Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car, by Alex Davies (2021).
"An Oral History of the Darpa Grand Challenge, the Grueling Robot Race That Launched the Self-Driving Car," by Alex Davies (WIRED, 2017).
Understanding AI, newsletter on Substack.
Waymo Safety Dashboard.
EXTRAS:
"The Fascinatingly Mundane Secrets of the World’s Most Exclusive Nightclub," by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
Search Engine, podcast by PJ Vogt.
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The Man Who Builds for the Decade Ahead | Founder of Google X, Waymo, and Udacity
What does it take to reinvent entire industries, over and over again?
This week on Grit, Sebastian Thrun, the “godfather” of self-driving cars and massive open online courses, reflects on a career pushing the boundaries of technology across mobility, education, and AI.
With Joubin Mirzadegan, he shares why he believes autonomous driving could become the biggest lifesaving technology in history, and how a wake-up call led him to found Udacity to truly democratize higher education.
Guest: Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Stealth Startup, founder of Google X and Udacity
Connect with Sebastian Thrun
X
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
X
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
Sebastian Thrun: Flying Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, and Education
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.
This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or support it on Patreon.
This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.
Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
00:00 – Introduction
03:24 – The Matrix
04:39 – Predicting the future 30+ years ago
06:14 – Machine learning and expert systems
09:18 – How to pick what ideas to work on
11:27 – DARPA Grand Challenges
17:33 – What does it take to be a good leader?
23:44 – Autonomous vehicles
38:42 – Waymo and Tesla Autopilot
42:11 – Self-Driving Car Nanodegree
47:29 – Machine learning
51:10 – AI in medical applications
54:06 – AI-related job loss and education
57:51 – Teaching soft skills
1:00:13 – Kitty Hawk and flying cars
1:08:22 – Love and AI
1:13:12 – Life
The new generation of computers is programming itself | Sebastian Thrun and Chris Anderson
Educator and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun wants us to use AI to free humanity of repetitive work and unleash our creativity. In an inspiring, informative conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Thrun discusses the progress of deep learning, why we shouldn't fear runaway AI and how society will be better off if dull, tedious work is done with the help of machines. "Only one percent of interesting things have been invented yet," Thrun says. "I believe all of us are insanely creative ... [AI] will empower us to turn creativity into action."
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