The Man Who Built the AI That Could Destroy Us All

How Geoffrey Hinton went from neural network outcast to Nobel laureate—and why he's now terrified of his own creation

You've probably never heard of Geoffrey Hinton. But his work touches your life dozens of times each day. Every time you ask Siri a question, upload a photo that gets automatically tagged, or use Google Translate, you're using technology that exists because of one man's five-decade obsession with making computers think like brains.

Now, at 77, the man universally known as the "Godfather of Deep Learning" has done something extraordinary: he quit his job at Google and is spending his remaining years warning humanity about the monster he helped create.