Luc Steels is late for our interview. Apparently there’s an emergency and he needs to postpone. As he’s an expert in developing robot behaviour, I had visions of him trying to contain a James Bond style break-out at his HQ in Barcelona. Disappointingly it turns out to be a personal matter and nothing to worry about.

So back to the task in hand, his visit to the Oxford Playhouse to speak at The Annual Charles Simonyi Lecture in an attempt to make science more accessible to the public. No mean feat when you’re a world expert in your field, and your own profession has trouble understanding what you do, let alone us.

But it is a task that Luc is passionate about and feels is vital for the progression of science. Not that he’s short of listeners in Oxford, but that’s not the point. His talk isn’t for the geeks, it’s for people like me who have little to do with contemporary science.

“I think it’s very important, which is why I’m spending so much time on it,” he explains. Time he could be spending in the lab? “Well, yes. At the moment it is a very competitive enterprise and there are a lot of things to do, pursue and evaluate all the time, so the time you spend with the public lecturing, you do not have for research, but it’s still of critical importance.”

What the Belgian struggles with is doing a good job of it. “When you are locked up in your own little world with your colleagues, assistants and technology you don’t realise what you have to convey for people to understand you.” But then there are many things that vex Luc: funding issues, splitting himself into too many pieces, racing here, there and everywhere. As ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva in Barcelona and Director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, he works in Spain, lives in France, and has just got back from Tokyo when we speak. “Yes, work is taking over my life. I try to escape and take part in other activities but what I do is so engaging and you can’t do half a job,” he shrugs.

So back to the robots. The title of Luc’s lecture is Can Machines Be Creative, something perhaps we should fear as a human race? “Absolutely not! I want to quash the idea that we are dehumanising humans thorough our work with technical machines, when we are doing the exact opposite. It’s like looking through a telescope and seeing how beautiful and extremely complex everything going on in our minds is. The more issues that come up, the more problems and complexities arise. This is not a story that’s going to end soon. People seem to think artificial intelligence is just round the corner, but it’s not the case.

“We are so far behind the Hollywood experience with what we have today. So it’s a bit premature to worry about robots taking over the world, particularly in terms of autonomous thinking ability,” he sighs patiently. “For example, if you take a speech recognition system on a mobile phone, it’s amazing what you can do, but when you probe deeper it doesn’t understand what it’s doing, and makes mistakes.

“So the glass ceiling is too far away to break, but it’s like any other scientific discipline — you just keep going. “Centuries after Newton, physics is still ongoing. Science is endless and because the human mind is so complex we are still just scratching the surface.”

But Luc never planned to be a scientist. “When I was a boy I was more into music, theatre, writing and stuff. But I did have a great fascination for learning, and I started with linguistics and tumbled across computer science by accident, discovering the computer was an incredible tool to test language processing and it went from there,” he smiles. “But more than anything, my job does make you appreciate the complexities of the human mind. Not just how we walk and talk, but the knowledge we have about the world.

“So I constantly have to fight the notion that there’s a simple way of doing what I do."

Oxford Playhouse, Friday October 12, 5pm.

Tickets, £5. 01865 305305.