I'm Rufus Griskin, and this is the next big idea.

Today, are you smarter than a computer?

Will you always be?

By the fall of 2012, Jeff Hinton literally had not sat down for seven years.

He liked to say that he last sat down in 2005, and it was a mistake.

That's Kate Metz, a technology reporter for The New York Times.

And the guy he's talking about, Jeff Hinton, he's the most important computer scientist you've never heard of.

He had first entered his back as a teenager.

While growing up in Britain, he was lifting a space heater for his mother, and he slipped a disc.

You know how, in Jenga, one wrong move sends the whole tower tumbling down?

That's kind of what Jeff's spine is like.

Even the simple act of sitting can knock that disc loose and put him in so much pain, he's got to lay in bed for weeks.

So at some point, he decided the best thing to do was to simply stop sitting down altogether.

And what that meant was that he couldn't drive a car, he couldn't fly with the commercial airlines because they made him sit during takeoff and landing.

Whenever Jeff has to travel, he has no choice but to take the scenic route.

Like in 2012, when he decides to attend a computer science conference in Lake Tahoe, 2000 miles away from his home in Toronto.

It means a 13 hour bus ride, which he spends sprawled on the backseat, followed by three days, chugging across North America by train.

Seems like a hell of a lot of effort just to hear a bunch of academics read their latest papers, right?

But Jeff doesn't care so much about the conference itself.

He's there because he knows that representatives from the biggest tech companies in the world are going to be there too.

And that makes it the perfect place for Jeff Hinton to auction himself off.

He and two of his students have published this research paper where they've shown that they can build a technology that can recognize objects in images, which until then was an incredibly difficult thing to do.

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