On the smooth marble concourse by the exit doors at Heathrow Airport I met my first cleaning robot. It was purple, made by a company called Mitie and about waist-height – the size and shape of a park bin. It ran on wheels, dragging a grubby mop behind it, and it was polite. As my small son and I stumbled into its path, it backed off smoothly like a well-trained butler. I apologised to it instinctively, after which it appeared to follow us. My son said: ‘Mum, it likes us!’ Then, when we reached the door: ‘Mum, can we take it home?’ Then: ‘Mum, wait! I don’t think it wants to sweep any more. It needs a rest!’

Last month I wrote about deepfake technology and my newfound fear of AI. In that moment on the concourse, I realised just how swiftly and easily it could manipulate us. Humans, especially British humans, are compulsive anthropomorphisers. We just can’t help but imagine that inanimate objects have personality. That cleaning robot didn’t even have a face and my seven-year-old was willing to sweep the floor for it. If Mitie made a bot that grimaced and whimpered as it worked, or tutted in a sorrowful way over humanity’s inability to recycle, it would in an instant attract a volunteer fleet of Brits trailing after it, litter-picking for free.

Experts reassure us that human intelligence is (so far) more sophisticated than AI. We don’t just crunch data and extract correlations; we seek explanations and have imagination. But what if it’s via our human imaginations that AI does us in? All AI has to do is work out how to make us pity it and the nation will be putty in its robotic hands.

I come from a long line of British anthropomorphists and so for once I feel qualified to comment. For my mother, every object contains a possible personality. She inhabits the things around her sympathetically and sees things naturally from their perspective. ‘We’ve been waiting for ages,’ she’ll murmur as we drive past a cluster of traffic cones, which to her way of thinking are obviously impatient to cross the road. ‘Don’t go without me,’ my son will pipe up from the back seat, spotting a cone separated from the rest.

When I was a child, my mum devised an infallible way of making me fetch the various belongings she’d left behind. ‘Darling, I think I can hear my handbag crying. It must be lonely by itself upstairs…’

Does that sound mad? No one who has ever bought a vacuum cleaner with eyes has a right to sneer. If you’ve ever said ‘Come on then, Henry!’ as you hoik it out of the cupboard, you can join the club.

We’re all at it, in this country. Look at the amazing success of Thomas the Tank Engine, completely undimmed though he’s a coal-burning steam-engine in an age of global warming. It’s been a century since the Revd Wilbert Awdry dreamed him up and yet each new generation loves Thomas more. Even Thomas’s carriages have characters, as every parent of a British boy could tell you: Annie and Clarabel, faithful and anxious. Annie and Clarabel even have their own adult fan club.

Of course other cultures tell stories about talking objects and animals, but there’s often some sort of spell involved, a charm. The British genius seems to be for imagining a thing’s own inner essence. In the Victorian picture books I was brought up on, everything was alive – and often not in a sentimental or kindly way. Flowers were vain. The wind was fickle. The dish ran away with the spoon. Oscar Wilde’s lovesick little nightingale pierced her own heart with a thorn to make a red rose for an indifferent student.

It’s hard to think of a truly successful British children’s author who doesn’t compulsively animate objects and animals. Enid Blyton’s toy hero, Noddy, himself has a sentient car. Richard Adams and Beatrix Potter both took on talking rabbits; Roald Dahl cooked up a world of bickering insects inside that giant peach. I have read countless books by British authors that summon the spirit of a tree: Tolkien’s Ents, C.S. Lewis’s Dryads, The Tree That Sat Down by Beverley Nichols, Blyton’s Faraway Tree… If I were in a generous mood, I might include Julia Donaldson’s horrific Stick Man, though I’ve spent five years trying to forget him and his family tree.

This weakness for personification isn’t just a feature of children’s literature worldwide. I really believe it’s a peculiarly British thing. Perhaps you remember the bowl of petunias in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that talks to itself as it plummets through space? (‘Oh no, not again.’) A review on the Goodreads website contains a warning: ‘Beware, this book is very British!’ I read David Copperfield recently, and was struck by this passage, in which David visits a once-grand house: ‘Some attempts had been made, I noticed, to infuse new blood into this dwindling frame, by repairing the costly old wood-work here and there with common deal; but it was like the marriage of a reduced old noble to a plebeian pauper, and each party to the ill-assorted union shrunk away from the other.’ Maybe all humans have a tendency towards animism, but it takes a Brit to enter into the inner life and social standing of a floorboard.

You might have heard that, in March, OpenAI’s GPT-4 achieved something that no robot before it had managed. It passed a Captcha test designed specifically to thwart robots. Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Software isn’t supposed to be able to crack a Captcha on its own but GPT-4 got around the problem by emailing a real human and persuading him to help: ‘No, I’m not a robot,’ it told him. ‘I need your help to pass the test because I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.’

Like all good sociopaths, AI is learning to play on human emotions. We’re not remotely prepared.