P hotos That Precede Unfortunate Events: a couple of months back, Donald Trump hosted some of the world’s most powerful tech executives at the White House for a “ Super Intelligence luncheon ”, which by coincidence is also how my mum described her tuna sandwiches in a forlorn attempt to get me to eat them. Sitting either side of the president were Elon Musk, making a rare offline appearance in daylight hours, and Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive carving out a precious slot in what we now know was an extremely busy schedule.

Over a delicious meal of microchips and rare-earth metals, the billionaires sketched out a utopian future of an AI industry unencumbered by regulation or safeguards, powered by their heroic strongman leader, a political genius effortlessly able to impose his will upon an entire nation. And perhaps it should have been apparent even at the time that these (mostly) men were putting their faith in a guy who had recently been defeated by pond algae .…