An interview of Sebastian Thrun on The Charlie Rose Show has revealed the first feature of Google's Glass project, while providing some insight into the current status of artificial intelligence. The 20 minute interview looks at the new glasses, Sebastian's career so far, the future of education, and the projects he's currently working on.
Sebastian Thrun is well known among those studying AI for his free online courses at Udacity, a site offering university level computing courses. He's the former director of SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), and was part of the team which won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 (a race involving automated vehicles). Thrun now works at Google as the head of the Google X labs, and is responsible for the automated Google cars and Glass project that have made headlines recently.
During the interview, we're treated to a quick demo of the picture taking and sharing abilities of Google's Glass prototype. The host Charlie Rose became the subject of the demo when Thrun enabled the glasses and used head gestures to take and share the image to Google+.
Thurn pointed out that the display on the glasses is outside the users field of view, and will stay out of the way until the user requires it. He also mentioned that the development team are focusing on calendar event notifications, video streaming, and making phone calls.
Thurn also speaks of how Salman Khan inspired his online teaching initiative Udacity, which pushed him to leave Stanford as a lecturer in order to teach the greater community free of charge. Sebastian's quote at DLD was brought up during the discussion, "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill, and you could take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture 20 students, but I've taken the red pill, and I've seen wonderland".
If you're a fan of artificial intelligence and the way it's heading, check out the interview right here.
