The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph The 'Godfather of AI' on making machines clever and whether robots really will learn to kill us all?
 the 2004 film I Robot Credit: Alamy 26 August 2017 • 6:00am 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.
--
 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.
--
” Each Saturday morning he would go to Islington’s Essex Road library – the same establishment where Sixties playwright Joe Orton used to deface the books with pornographic images – and jot down in his notebook theories about how the brain worked.
 After a few years of toil, he returned to academia and in 1973 started a PHD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh.
 His tutors regularly told him he was wasting his time on neural networks, but Hinton plugged on regardless.