The ‘Godfather of AI’ on making machines clever and whether robots really will learn to kill us all?

Today, the Telegraph begins a three-part series reporting from Toronto’s booming Artificial Intelligence sector where new technologies are being pioneered that will permanently change all of our lives

Deep within the inner sanctum of Google’s downtown HQ in Toronto, past the rooftop crazy golf putting greens, foosball tables and ergonomic furniture sporting the bold primary colours of the company logo – stands a scruffy figure so incongruous, he might have been drawn by Quentin Blake.

In person, Professor Geoffrey Hinton bears all the hallmarks of the quintessential British academic: tousled hair; crumpled shirt with a barrage of biros in the top pocket and flanked by a vast, mucky whiteboard scrawled with impregnable equations. There are no chairs in his office. The 69-year-old prefers always to stand.

Gleefully eccentric he may be, but to the bright young things outside his office, Hinton is akin to a deity: the so-called “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence (AI)” and the brilliant mind behind the technology that has sparked a global revolution.

In this, his first British newspaper interview, Professor Hinton admits to being bemused by the nickname that has accompanied his late career surge.

His former students have now been poached by Silicon Valley to lead AI research at the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google (which has also appointed him a vice president engineering fellow). In the coming months, he will take the helm of Toronto’s new $180m Vector Institute, which it is hoped will cement the city’s status as a world leader in AI.

“I feel slightly embarrassed by being called the godfather,” he says in a cut-glass English accent that has resisted all North American overtures.

What bought Geoffrey Hinton from years of relative academic obscurity to leading the cutting edge of AI is an unshakeable faith in his work. “I have a Reagan-like ability to believe in my own data,” he grins.

Hinton is a pioneer of something called machine learning which enables computers to come up with programmes to solve problems themselves. In particular, he has devised a subset of machine learning called “deep learning” whereby neural networks modelled on those that form the human brain enable machines to learn in the same way a toddler does.

This means computers can autonomously build layers of intelligence. Such systems have been supercharged in recent years by the advent of hugely powerful processing technology and are now becoming mainstream: powering everything from speech recognition patterns in our smart phones to image detection software and Amazon telling you which book to buy next.

Through the work of Hinton and his colleagues – dubbed by their rivals the “Canadian Mafia” – the potential of machine learning has become limitless. The Brave New World of AI is upon us and already permanently changing our lives; for good and ill.

Hinton was born in Wimbledon in post war Britain. His father, Howard, was an entomologist with a particular fondness for beetles. His mother, Margaret, a school teacher. A streak of brilliance runs through the family DNA. His uncle was the economist Colin Clark, who invented the term “gross national product”. His great-great grandfather was the logician George Boole, who invented Boolean algebra, a foundation of modern computing.

The family moved to Bristol where Hinton attended Clifton College, a place he calls a “second-rate public school”. It was there that a school friend first introduced Hinton to the wonders of AI by talking to him about holograms and how the brain stores memories.

After school, he was awarded a place at King’s College, Cambridge to read physics and chemistry but dropped out after a month. “I was 18 it was the first time I had lived apart from home.