Artificial intelligence and what it owes a man who never sits down

I first came across the legend of Hinton in a fabulous book by Cade Metz called Genius Makers, where he detailed the lives of those who shaped AI, foremost among them being Hinton. After studying psychology at Cambridge and AI at the University of Edinburgh, Hinton went back to something which had fascinated him even as a child: How the human brain stored memories, and how it worked. He was one of the first researchers who started working on'mimicking' the human brain with computer hardware and software, thus constructing a newer and purer form of AI, which we now call'deep learning'. He started doing this in the 1980s, along with an intrepid bunch of students. His PhD thesis, titled Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modelling in Speech Recognition, demonstrated how deep neural networks outclassed older machine learning models like Hidden Markovs and Gaussian Mixtures at identifying speech patterns.