Toronto’s booming Artificial Intelligence sector reported 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. It was awfully hard work, there weren’t any girls and I got depressed,” he says.
The following year he re-applied to read architecture but again dropped out – this time after just a day – and switched instead to physics and physiology. He then changed again to philosophy but ended up falling out with his tutors. “I have a sort of educational ADHD,” he admits.
Rather than complete his studies, Hinton quit and moved to the then insalubrious streets of Islington, north London, where he became a jobbing carpenter. “I made shelves, hung doors, nothing fancy. The sort of stuff people get paid for.”
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.
He moved to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to continue his research, but soon realised the Department of Defence (DoD) was funding much of the work on AI in his department and across the US. He quit in protest to move to Canada where military funding was less pernicious.
“When I left, I took an American penny and blew it up with a Xerox machine and put it up on my office door,” he says. “But I changed the ‘G’ to a ‘D’ so it read: in DoD we trust.”
According to Hinton, rather than fearing the growing intelligence of machines a far more pressing threat to humanity is the development of killer robots (underlined this week by a petition signed by the founders of 116 AI companies to the UN calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons).
Hinton has signed a similar petition himself and previously wrote to express his concerns to Britain’s Ministry of Defence. “The reply said there is no need to do anything about this now because the technology is a long way away, and anyway, it might be quite useful,” he says. “But they certainly have the capacity to do this.”
He also fears the use of AI in increasing surveillance of the civilian population and reveals he once declined a job to sit on the board of the Canadian equivalent of the NSA because of fears over how his research could be abused by the security services.
Still, even while discussing the terror of weaponised “drone swarms” currently being developed, Hinton remains evangelical about the benefits of AI – particularly in healthcare and education.
He lost his first wife, Ros, to ovarian cancer in 1994 leaving him to look after their two young adopted children as a single parent. He later re-married to his current wife, Jackie, but says she too has now been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Medicine, he believes, will become far more efficient as a result of AI. Soon he envisages anybody being able to pay $100 to have their genome mapped (the current cost is $1,000). Unpopular as it makes him with radiologists, Hinton also believes X-ray detection could soon be largely robot work.
Jobs will be lost, but he insists it is the job of governments and business to ensure that the next automation of our economy does not leave people behind.
“In a sensibly organised society, if you improve productivity there is room for everybody to benefit,” he says. “The problem is not the technology, but the way the benefits are shared out.”
Even the visionary admits he does not know where the AI revolutionwill take us next. “It is very hard to predict beyond five years in this area and things always turn out differently to what you expect,” he says.
Suffice to say, the world as we know it is about to be turned on its head.
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