I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.
I take all day to climb mountains and then spend about 10 minutes at the top admiring the view.
Honestly, the average American spends about 52 minutes a day in commute traffic. And as much as I love driving my car and many people like driving their car, commuting has never been fun for me.
People complain about the rich-and-poor divide. It's crazy, no doubt about it. But what gets me is that today, a billionaire or head of state on their smartphone has the same direct access to information as a homeless person has on a smartphone - or a person in Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea.
When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident.
Even as a college professor at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I went out, took risks, and tried to invent new things, such as participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge and working on self-driving cars.
Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It's really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.
The 99 percent should be protesting college campuses.
As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.
I envision a future without traffic accidents or congestion. A future where everyone can use a car.
Horizontal meetings are team or project meetings, set up to coordinate individual activities. When I worked in a large tech company, those meetings just popped up in my calendar by the dozen.
The last thing I want my robot to be is sarcastic. I want them to be pragmatic and reliable - just like my dishwasher.
Obviously, a lot of non-profits live on donations, and that's a wonderful thing. But higher education can't exist on donations only because, if that were the case, we would have a hard time paying teachers adequate salaries.
No state in the U.S. expressly forbids autonomous driving.
I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.
I used to tell my graduate students at Stanford, 'Don't worry about what job you have to pick because your job picks you. Let your job pick you. Find something you are passionate about. Then when you are passionate, be persistent. Just keep doing it for a while because progress is always hard work. It never rests in ideas.'
You could claim that moving from pixelated perception, where the robot looks at sensor data, to understanding and predicting the environment is a Holy Grail of artificial intelligence.
I don't think we will put higher-ed out of business. I think we'll evolve it. More access, higher quality, lower costs, more global reach.
With the right care at the right time, a huge number of people could stay independent much longer, with a higher quality of life.
In much of computer science, I can easily 'auto-grade' your work and give you an instant meaningful feedback. I can't do this when it comes to the subtlety of human thought, language, poetry, philosophy.