By contrast, technology businesses, which pride themselves on their adaptability and ingenuity, are more sanguine about Brexit than you might imagine. There are certainly concerns about access both to European talent and the Digital Single Market - which aims to allow online companies and websites to operate easily across the EU, just as mobile phones do since roaming charges were abolished since last year. But at Tech City, where Gerard Grech keep tabs on all the key statistics, all is not doom and gloom. “The three top countries for tech skills immigrants coming to this country in 2016 [the last year for which data is available] were not in the EU but the US, India and Australia,” he notes. “So the UK should not be shy. We have taken a risk leaving the EU, in a self-determining way. With risk must come opportunity, otherwise what’s the point in doing it? This entrepreneurial community says we’ll rise to this challenge. Entrepreneurial risk culture is part of making this a success. As we leave the EU, the whole country has to be readied to make the most of the change that is coming. It will be a constant revolution, for which we will need to psychological fitness, staying power and resilience. It’s a state of mind. The country needs to be ready for that.”

Some in the tech world moan that such positivity does not always radiate from the Prime Minister, Theresa May. That, as just the moment a cheerleader is required, we have a dour manager in charge. “We’re expecting the government to create the conditions to allow business to thrive,” says Dom Hallas, who until January was an official at the Department for Exiting the European Union but is now Executive Director of Coadec, which acts as an intermediary between startups and Government. “One of the challenges we have quite frankly is that unfortunately we have a PM who… is not very business minded. That’s the reality. And so concerning.”

More than that, Hallas says that her default response to technology is wariness and suspicion, that where others see opportunity, she sees threats. “You start a conversation about technology and within two sentences you’re talking about paedophiles. It’s extraordinary. It’s baffling. That’s the [official] mindset that frankly flows from the top.”

It was significant, therefore, that Mrs May chose Artificial Intelligence as the theme of her speech in Davos this year. For many, Britain has a real opportunity to become a world leader in the field. DeepMind may have been bought by Google, but it remains in London - a platform which draws machine learning pioneers from around the world, and from where they can go on to create countless AI spinoffs of their own.