In February, the United Kingdom joined the United States in refusing to sign a landmark declaration agreed by 60 other nations at an international summit on artificial intelligence held in Paris to develop a coordinated approach to the ethical use and regulation of that technology.

Donald Trump's administration is unambiguous in its resistance to any form of transnational regulation – or indeed transnational cooperation – and especially any kind of regulation which might negatively impact on the profits of his friends and backers in the technology and energy industries.

His debt to those allies was emphasized that same week by a bizarre press conference which the eccentric supervillain Elon Musk held in the Oval Office, while balancing his son on his shoulders, as the American president – having been told to “shut up” by the four-year-old – gazed up from his desk at the tech giant in wonder and awe.

Britain's reasons for declining to endorse the Paris AI agreement were rather more obscure than those voiced by the lackeys of the protectionist president. But many believe that the UK’s reticence to stand alongside its peers in the international community represented an attempt by Keir Starmer to further ingratiate himself with the US leader.

This seems like something of an about-face for the head of a political party which hasn't always expressed its love for Mr. Trump… an act of sycophancy which, ironically, took place the same week that Boris Johnson – once the Donald's best friend – provocatively suggested that perhaps, if the American president really thinks he has the right to displace the people of Gaza so that he can turn their land into a holiday destination, maybe he could invite them to come and stay at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Florida's Palm Beach instead.

Meanwhile, the UK government's official reason for failing to sign the AI declaration was that it "didn’t provide enough practical clarity on global governance, nor sufficiently address harder questions around national security and the challenge AI poses to it" – but neither the experts in diplomacy nor the digital buffs appeared quite sure what the Brits might have meant by that.

Then, during the week of the AI Action summit – with a timeliness which underlined the urgency of their message – boffins from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published the findings of a research project which demonstrated that the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence serves to dull its users' critical faculties.

The word 'duh' might spring immediately to mind.

It's pretty obvious, isn't it, that machines designed to do your thinking for you won't help you become a sharper thinker…?

We haven't stopped teaching children arithmetic because calculators exist. It's only by being versed in basic mathematical skills that we can automatically recognise errors in calculations, and – for example – think critically about the statistical analyses which governments, corporations and the media tend to throw at us every day.

We haven't stopped teaching literacy because we can now dictate our words to computers or because those computers can now read texts back to us. We recognise there's a value in the art of reading and writing, in the assimilation, processing, understanding, expression and communication of thought in written form.

After all, we didn't stop writing by hand the minute that the typewriter or word processor were invented – although our handwriting abilities (and perhaps our corresponding abilities to sift and refine our thoughts) do appear to have been diminished by the proliferation of those technologies.

And we don't stop encouraging people to play sports or enjoy other forms of physical exercise just because cars, trains and buses mean we don't have to walk everywhere anymore.

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Education and lifelong learning are all about practising, exercising and honing our skills. Such approaches are key to original and innovative thought.

But that didn’t stop Tony Blair declaring last month that the need to adapt research practices to harness the power of AI is an “economic imperative”.

The possibility of the capitulation of politicians – or, for that matter, even some educators – to a monopoly on the control of human thought held by an oligarchy of multi-billionaire tech magnates should therefore be a matter of serious public and global concern.

AI can harvest, plagiarize, and replace original thought. It can write an essay for you – or a letter to your grandmother – or for that matter an opinion piece about AI. It can do all those things for us which give us purpose and enrich our lives. It can make all our voices – and perspectives – sound the same.

Last month, concerns were voiced in the western press about the fact that China's new low-cost AI technology has not only wiped billions off the value of American tech companies but also contains algorithms which appear to impose cultural bias and political filters onto the texts it generates.

What's most extraordinary about this response is that it appears (with extraordinary naivety) to presume that the generative artificial intelligence chatbots to have emerged from Silicon Valley are, by contrast, somehow ideologically neutral, natural and transparent, as if their machine learning hasn't been established upon prescribed sets of texts and paradigms.

The danger of AI is that – as already seems to be happening – we'll let it do our thinking for us, and that this will make us think, and see and interact with the world, in the ways its programming wants us to – in ways which may irrevocably change the nature of who we are.

For this is the way the world ends: not with the explosive rise of murderous machines modelled in the image of muscle-bound movie stars, but with the slow, lazy, whimpering deflation of the human spirit, our will to determine our own fate – and a turgid reversion to the primal idiocy all too often displayed by those who want to make America – or Britain, Germany, France or wherever – great (or hate) again.

This idiocy was last month ably demonstrated by the former boss of a Scottish brewery who announced that he is unilaterally establishing his own unofficial UK version of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, prompting the political economist Richard Murphy to respond that “every time an idiot comes along on the world stage... someone will come along who wants, at the very least, to match them in terms of stupidity”.

In the week that the board of OpenAI rejected Elon Musk’s offer of nearly $97.4 billion to buy their company – and offered him a tenth of that sum to take the platform formerly known as Twitter off his hands – it looks like Britain could have found its own latest leading lunatic.

Our Chancellor – who has in recent weeks been repeatedly accused of overstating her economic credentials on various versions of her employment history – will doubtless tremble before the might of the Scots brewer's fiscal illiteracy.

And the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss (and the Labour MPs recently suspended for sending offensive WhatsApp messages about constituents) will only be able look on from the sidelines, like a musky Trump in the shadow of his new corporate master, in admiration and envy at the magnificence of the beery multimillionaire’s boorish foolishness.

Yes, however moronic our latest would-be demagogues may be, there’s always someone dumber and more powerful waiting just around the corner to dump their novel brand of brainless populism upon our unsuspecting world.

Last month – in a scathing vitriolic address at a security summit in Munich – the US vice president told European leaders that they should be able to “survive a few months of Elon Musk”.

But whether or not our civilizations will survive many years or decades dominated by the dehumanizing technologies controlled and championed by Musk and his kind is a very different matter indeed.