“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.