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

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). 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. Through the work of Hinton and his colleagues – dubbed by their rivals the "Canadian Mafia" – the potential of machine learning has become limitless.