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As a boy,
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I loved cars.
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When I turned 18,
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I lost my best friend to a car accident.
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Like this.
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And then I decided I'd dedicate my life
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to saving one million people
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every year.
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Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report,
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but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.
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I saw the concept first
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in the DARPA Grand Challenges
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where the U.S. government issued a prize
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to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert.
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And even though a hundred teams were there,
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these cars went nowhere.
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So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car.
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We built the hardware and the software.
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We made it learn from us,
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and we set it free in the desert.
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And the unimaginable happened:
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it became the first car
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to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge,
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winning Stanford 2 million dollars.
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Yet I still hadn't saved a single life.
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Since, our work has focused
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on building driving cars
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that can drive anywhere by themselves --
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any street in California.
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We've driven 140,000 miles.
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Our cars have sensors
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by which they magically can see
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everything around them
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and make decisions
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about every aspect of driving.
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It's the perfect driving mechanism.
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We've driven in cities,
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like in San Francisco here.
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We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.
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We've encountered joggers,
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busy highways, toll booths,
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and this is without a person in the loop;
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the car just drives itself.
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In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles,
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people didn't even notice.
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Mountain roads,
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day and night,
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and even crooked Lombard Street
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in San Francisco.
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(Laughter)
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Sometimes our cars get so crazy,
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they even do little stunts.
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(Video) Man: Oh, my God.
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What?
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Second Man: It's driving itself.
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Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life,
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but I can do something for all the people who died.
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Do you know that driving accidents
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are the number one cause of death for young people?
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And do you realize that almost all of those
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are due to human error
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and not machine error,
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and can therefore be prevented by machines?
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Do you realize
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that we could change the capacity of highways
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by a factor of two or three
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if we didn't rely on human precision
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on staying in the lane --
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improve body position
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and therefore drive a little bit closer together
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on a little bit narrower lanes,
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and do away with all traffic jams on highways?
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Do you realize that you, TED users,
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spend an average
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of 52 minutes per day
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in traffic,
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wasting your time
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on your daily commute?
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You could regain this time.
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This is four billion hours
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wasted in this country alone.
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And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted.
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Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology,
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and I'm really looking forward to a time
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when generations after us look back at us
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and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)