Artificial Intelligence won’t replace people, but add to their capabilities: Sebastian Thrun, CEO Kitty Hawk

Twenty years from now we will speak all languages, recognise all faces, remember conversations and diseases that kill people today but will be detected much earlier now, thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered systems. In 50 years, it might be possible children born then will live to at least 200 years; and climate change will come to a halt! The world will be completely powered by alternate sources of energy instead of burning fossil fuels. Such romantic, tech assisted, science-fiction-become-reality kind of vision is what Silicon Valley deep tech scientist Sebastian Thrun believes will be true.

In fact, Thrun, 51, who co-founded and runs three startups simultaneously, is working towards some of these goals himself. Udacity is for online learning, offering nano-degrees (short courses) in areas including drones and machine learning; Kitty Hawk Corp is making electric planes and flying cars while AI powered Cresta.ai is trying to automate repetitive jobs. Thrun worked at and led Google’s self-driving car project before turning entrepreneur. Google co-founder Larry Page is an investor in Kitty Hawk. “AI will not replace people but will augment their capabilities,” said Thrun in an exclusive interview with ET, on the sidelines of the Global Business Summit (GBS).

AI picks up patterns — be it driving cars, detecting cancers or selling products – and will help novices get better, emphasises Thrun. He sees technology-driven advances in all areas be it education, finance, communication or transport. For example, in education, Thrun’s attempt via Udacity is to imagine what education will look like 50 years from now. “First and foremost, Udacity creates access. We have great universities in the US but they accept only a few hundred thousand students each year. Udacity has 10 million active learners around the world. Secondly, one-time education fits into a 19th century model, not in 21st century, where we have to refresh skills over and over. That’s where Udacity comes in — our typical customer is life-long learner,” says Thrun, CEO, Udacity. So far, more than 30,000 students from India have undertaken paid courses at Udacity.


In medicine, there’s a shortage of dermatologists in the US - there are only 10,000 dermatologists in the US and they earn salaries around $450,000 a year. Very few can detect skin cancers. “Making machines to do the diagnosis will help humans be better—that’s like a machine which is as good as a Stanford level human dermatologist,” says Thrun.