A BEAUTIFUL
MIND
“I have a really deep belief that
we create technologies to empower
ourselves. We’ve invented a lot of
technology that just makes us all
faster and better and I’m generally a big fan of this,” Thrun says.
“I just want to make sure that this
technology stays subservient to
people. People are the number one
entity there is on this planet.”
Simple and Streamlined
Though Thrun says his adult life
revolves around trying to find ways
that technology can help people,
his childhood and adolescence were
mainly about self-help.
The youngest of three children,
Thrun was born in 1967 in Solingen, Germany. His parents, devout
Catholics, told him he was an unplanned baby. Thrun recalls having little contact with his parents,
and especially his father. His siblings “required a lot of attention
and there was almost no attention
left for me,” he says.
His father was a construction
company executive and more often
than not his first order of business
was disciplining Sebastian or his
one of siblings with a beating, at
the request of his wife. Thrun says
his stay-at-home mom was “heavy
into punishing people and sins
HUFFINGTON
8.19.12
and all that stuff.”
Thrun responded by retreating into a solo world of calculators,
computers and code.
“I reacted a lot by just insulating myself from this and so mentally, emotionally I wasn’t that
connected,” he says. “I learned to
basically pull my own weight, just
do my own thing. I spent a lot of
time alone and I loved it. It was
actually really great because to
the present day I love spending
time alone. I go bicycling alone,
go climbing alone and I just love
being with myself and observing
myself and learning something.”
Thrun befriended an inventor in his neighborhood who gave
him spare parts and a soldering
iron, then let him tinker. As an
eight-year-old, he’d come home
from school, shut himself up in his
room, turn on Pink Floyd, AC/DC,
Mozart, or Bach, and spend hours
sitting on his bed programming his
Texas Instruments TI-57 calculator
to solve math problems and play
games (These days you can find
him blasting a mix of classical concertos and Rihanna).
The calculator had no memory, of course, so every time he
switched it off, he lost all his code.
Eventually, he graduated from
his calculator to a display model
computer at the local department
store, but basically, he was still