She is not scrolling social media, nor catching up on messages. She is writing code for her AI startup, rehearsing answers for an investor interview, half-arguing with a chatbot about baseball’s infield fly rule. The woman—a mother of three boys, described in a firsthand account—has become a familiar figure in the bleachers of travel-ball fields: a parent whose phone is not a portal to distraction but a tether to a new kind of productivity. Her children see her do it. In this household, artificial intelligence is not a spectre but a tool, as quotidian as the family car.

That domestic vignette, drawn from the United States, captures a larger shift underway worldwide. The conversation around generative AI is moving from existential dread to practical negotiation, though the fault lines remain jagged. In Washington, the government briefly banned Anthropic’s Fable 5 model in June, citing a potential jailbreak that might expose software vulnerabilities. After weeks of talks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the ban would lift, praising the company’s commitment to new safety protocols. The episode illustrated the push-and-pull between innovation and precaution that now defines transatlantic tech diplomacy.

Elsewhere, the language is less about code than about care. An Italian Latin teacher wrote to a columnist of her fear that AI would slowly replace humans in education and work. The reply, steeped in Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, insisted that no algorithm can replicate the gaze of a teacher who knows her students’ fragilities and talents. Meanwhile, a nationwide survey in Brazil by Datafolha recorded a telling swing: the share of people who fear being replaced by AI dropped from 56 percent to 48 percent in a single year, even as those who had used the technology for work climbed from 17 percent to 24 percent. Economists in São Paulo note that initial catastrophism is giving way to a lived sense that, for all the disruption, jobs have not vanished en masse.

The ambivalence is mirrored in high-level economic debates. Some, like the newly installed chair of the US Federal Reserve, have cast AI as a disinflationary force that could allow central banks to keep interest rates low. Others point to a surge in demand—from data-centre buildouts to buoyant equity markets—that may instead push rates higher. Viewed from London, analysts recall the 1990s, when IT-fuelled productivity gains eventually stoked an investment frenzy that forced rate rises. In Tehran, reports circulate of a US congressman stunned to see an AI model hack a simulated bank and then patch its own vulnerabilities, a reminder that the technology’s power to destabilise is as real as its promise to streamline.

For the mother at the ballpark, such abstractions dissolve in the rhythm of the game. When the top of the fourth inning arrives and her son steps into the batter’s box, she puts down the phone. The AI can wait.